Chris Bennett: "...beckonings and glimpses"- 1 September 2007

Chris Bennett was born in London in 1957 and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in the early 1980s under Euan Uglow, Geoffrey Camp and Phil Sutton. He has exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy Summer Show and with the Royal Institute of Oil Painters at the Mall Galleries, London

 

He signed a sole publishing contract with De Montfort Fine Art, who publish his work as limited edition prints in the UK and internationally. His work is also published in the USA as open editions and licensed products.

           

'We do not need purple prose to describe what an artist does. Art is mysterious enough without confounding it with a glossy surface. I try to be as straight forward and as clear as possible about the process of making it without losing the sense that one is never dealing in certainties but with ambiguities, nuance, promptings, beckonings and glimpses. It is this ethereal nature of what the artist works with that means clarity about the tools they use to fashion it is even more essential.. you cannot build on vagueness. So, to be clear is not to demystify anything. Quite the opposite: it is to throw into greater relief the skirts of the beckoning muse, glimpsed as she turns the corner of the hallway of our comprehension.’

Chris Bennett paints in two distinctive oeuvres, both rooted in his formal training at the Slade under the tutelage of significant figures in 20th century painting, particularly Euan Uglow. His first style, most recognisable through limited edition prints, are evocative images of a dreamlike world. However, the raw materials of this inner world are common to us all – images of the car, the aeroplane, the detective, the film star, and the city. These iconic objects, while referring to memories and aspirations are not nostalgic, but rather provide a universal and timeless quality. In describing his images, Chris Bennett relates that someone once said that his paintings look like stills from a film they were sure they had seen but could not quite put their finger on. To Bennett, this observation describes exactly what his paintings are about.  

      

Chris Bennett’s other style is concerned with the formal elements of painting – composition, space and colour. References to  Uglow in these works are apparent, in the sense of relentless looking, describing, interpreting. His paintings are remarkably tranquil, reduced to simplicity and as powerfully evocative as his more narrative work. The aspect of structural strength and observational capacity is further evidenced in his exquisite portraits and a notable commission was for Sir William Hawthorne, now in the collection of Churchill College, Cambridge who, with Sir Frank Whittle, designed the first jet engine