Artist Bio:

Ben is a visual artist whose work is predominantly comprised of large-scale, abstract color-field paintings. These pieces are created using mark-making techniques that combine oils, acrylic house paints, dyes, glue, wax, bleach and other solvents. The paint is applied using dying techniques, squeegees, palette knives, paint scrapers, rags, and directly by hand. This creates thick, viscous oceans of psychedelic colours - and within them, hidden worlds that evoke dreams, ghosts and memories. The physicality of how the mixed media is applied combines elements of action painting and process art, invoking abstract expressionism and neo-Dadaism. The resulting fabrics are then stretched, collaged or draped onto other canvases and linens and hung in and around timber frames, often blurring the line between 2D painting and 3D sculpture.

Born in 1980 in Melbourne, Ben studied graphic design, fine art and screenwriting from 1999 – 2008. From 2001 – 2020, he lived and worked in Melbourne. He had his debut exhibition – Radlands, a series of nine large-scale collages – at Bruce Gallery in 2012. He then shifted his focus onto abstract painting and film-making. In 2019, he presented a new series of colour-field paintings at a group show at Five Walls Gallery, Melbourne. Since 2020, he has embraced the coastal lifestyle, living around the Geelong/Djilang and Surf Coast area, which has provided much inspiration and influenced his painting style significantly.

By originally working on more minimal colour-field paintings, Ben’s process has gradually evolved into one where more free-flowing spectrums are created by different pigments and materials crossing paths, colliding and reacting to one another. This kind of ‘automatic painting’ comes from the idea that some of the most rich, brilliant and evocative colour combinations can only be tapped into subconsciously, or semi-unintentionally. Therefore the objective is to set the scene for this to be able to happen, and then to capture it; meaning that elements of nature and happenstance also play a significant role in what ends up on the canvas.

The process of collaging is then employed as a means of causing a break, or a rift, in these oceans of colour, which then present certain windows, doors, gateways to different spaces and dimensions. Hard, defined edges cut through otherwise nebulous spaces, free-flowing abstract fields are framed and bifurcated, giving them new contexts; a literal dissecting and containing of something otherwise infinite and edgeless, like looking out at the stars through a window frame, or at the ocean from the edge of an infinity pool.

This process has been further explored in some of Ben’s recent short films, such as Invisible Island and Night Visions, using 16mm film stocks with different colour mattes and lighting effects.