Chris Bennett |
Chris Bennett was born in London in 1957 and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in the early 80s 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. His current works are to be seen in prestigious galleries around the UK. A notable commission is a portrait of Sir William Hawthorne, now in the collection of Churchill College, Cambridge who, with Sir Frank Whittle, designed the first jet engine.
Chris paints an internal world, a distillation of something seen or half glimpsed in life, which is digested and later realised as a formal image; he is painting an ideal, not an idea. The paintings are the outcome of giving an external shape to an internal experience. Looking back at his pictures, Chris recognizes the events that occur in them and remembers them taking place before him, the way one remembers the first meeting with people whom one comes to love most dearly. To give pictorial expression to these events is what guides these paintings to their realisations. For Chris, there must always be a seed, the grain of sand in the oyster which symbolises what is most important in the artists eyes, that is alive and continues to live in oneself as the picture is born and grows.