How to Santa Fe

Christopher Benson, Yellow Doorway #2, oil on linen, 20” x 16”

Christopher Benson, Untitled Collage #2, archival ink print on heavy rag paper, 24” x 18”

For many years, I cycled among the three idioms of realism, abstraction, and expressionism, which—along with surrealism—were the major movements of modern art in the century leading up to my own early art-student years in the 1970s. I’ve landed at different times in each of these ways of painting, but have never felt entirely at home in any one.

After living for long periods on both coasts of the US, I moved to New Mexico in 2006. Since arriving in this somewhat middle place, I’ve also worked at combining my various painterly languages into a single middle form that combines the physicality of expressive abstraction with some evidence of a plausibly observed world. I like a painted surface that can be a complete reality unto itself—as abstractionists on both coasts achieved between the 1940s and 1960s—but that also accepts the reality that we will inevitably make pictures out of even the most starkly nonobjective paintings.

–Christopher Benson