By Suzanne Benton
Located in Darien, CT
In this ninth decade of life, and as a working artist for nearly70 years, Suzanne Benton has become interested in the concept of Late Style as described by the literary theorist Edward Said. “Each of us can supply evidence of late works, which crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor,” Matisse had it with his renowned paper cuts. While nearly blind, Monet created the water lily paintings as his final legacy to the history of art.
Benton's Late Style arrived as a surprise during the Covid pandemic. The resultant aloneness from sheltering in place brought her to an uncanny level of solitude that only painting could voice. She reached for the purest of colors, and entered a celebratory world to create the Neo-Transcendental paintings titled All About Color.
The disappeared narrative came as a surprise. It had been the mainstay of the masks and mask tale performances, monoprints and paintings. This time though, the artist needed to bring a vibrancy to canvas, and to make tangible this sense of sheer essence that had pressed into her inner self in that time of stillness.
Well educated in color by John Ferren, the abstract expressionist painter who’d taught the year’s color study at Queen College. The sensitivity developed further through
four lengthy art-working journeys to India, starting in 1976-77, continuing with a 1992-1993 Fulbright, and additional South Asia residencies in 1995, and 2011. Those and others in Africa brought an ever more attuned palette to decades of monoprints with Chine collé that featured imagery from world culture, as well as her Americana of 19th and 20th century women writers, educators, suffragists, and feminists.
These Late Style artworks explore the cosmic realm. Its deceptive simplicity reminds Benton of Buffie Johnson’s late work. She, an early celebrator of Great Goddess imagery turned to circles in her latter years. similarly, Benton had drawn on rich Goddess imagery since the 1970’s...
Category
2010s Orphist Gesso Paintings
MaterialsGesso, Birch, Oil, Board
