Suzanne Benton

Artist Statement

SUZANNE BENTON Artist’s Statement ALL ABOUT COLOR

All About Color paintings speak of an inner life transformed by the Covid Pandemic. Had its time of enforced stillness changed you too?

The solitude of sheltering-in-place penetrated my inner life. It awakened a higher attunement to the natural world, and roused an ethereal awareness that could only be expressed with the brightest of colors.

The paintings follow decades of intertwining color, shape, and imagery in oil painting and distinctive printmaking. The disappeared narrative came as a surprise. The embedded image had been a mainstay in decades of two-dimensional artworks. My welded steel and bronze masks, and mask tale performances rely on character and story to amaze audiences.

This new direction had to be drenched in color. Color itself became the conversation. I’d been well-educated in color by John Ferren, the twentieth century abstract expressionist painter who’d taught my year of color study at Queen College, CUNY (City University of New York). That bedrock learning intensified greatly during extensive art-working journeys in South Asian and African lands where bedazzling juxtapositions of color added to my palette.

Seven decades of artmaking has brought me to recasting those (and Florida’s) sun-filled-worlds into color-drenched transcendental paintings of cosmic realms and unknown worlds. The solitude that brought this work forward, has precedence in my artist-knowing how a bright sun plays upon the water and animates a sky with panoplies of color. As the years flow by, we all bear witness to the come and go of flowers. Haven’t you too become breathless on seeing buds open to brilliance on trees and bushes, and to the play of ever-changing light passing through the day?

The term Late Style was coined by the literary theorist Edward Said. He’d wisely stated that “.. works also come late in artistic careers, works that ‘reopen questions’.” With All About Color being my Later Style, there are reflections that come with age, the knit of a lifetime’s journey, and the whispering voice of mortality.