Pamela Benham : Rhapsody
Chromatic Sonatas in Major and Minor Keys
The Voice Gallery, Santa Barbara
April 4th - 28th, 2024
Chromatic Sonatas in Major and Minor Keys
The Voice Gallery, Santa Barbara
April 4th - 28th, 2024
Art About Musical Pulse and Impulse
Essay By Josef Woodard
On paper--or more precisely, in theory--the worlds of music and visual art might seem to inhabit different worlds of expression. Music happens in time and motion, whereas painting, for instance, is necessarily static, about fixed artistic objects to be reflected upon for unspecified amounts of time. And yet a strong case can be made for common aesthetic qualities between those two worlds, bound by similar interests of color/harmony, rhythm/line or gesture and shared structural interests.
Music has been explicitly cited as a primary influence for such painters as Wasily Kandinsky and Stuart Davis and can implicitly be read into a vast array of art throughout history. And any implied musical character in the work of abstractionist painter Pamela Benham comes to the fore and comes clean, as it were, in her latest exhibition of exuberant canvases, under the telling title “Rhapsody: Chromatic Sonatas in Major and Minor Keys,” at Santa Barbara’s Voice Gallery.
Benham’s earlier exhibitions in Santa Barbara, in the public library’s Faulkner Gallery, have gone by other poetically suitable titles: “Visual Energy: Turning Up the Volume” in 2019 and “With Flying Colors” in 2022. This time out, the musical muse has paid an extended visit to her studio. Musical resonances and cross-references seem all the more embedded in her swirls of sensory energy and harmonic evanescence (“chromatic” alludes to both musical harmony and color itself).
Speaking of her studio, amidst the array of more than two dozen sizeable canvases in the voice gallery, we also find a remnant from her actual workspace. A large white drop cloth is speckled and spattered with paint, implying her natural action painting ways while in pursuit of her finished art.
Painting has been a dedicated, lived-in life’s work for the artist. Benham’s resume includes studies at NYC’s famed Cooper Union and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and she worked with Claes Oldenburg while in New York. Showing on the east coast and in Europe, Benham has also graced many galleries in her adopted home of Santa Barbara, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. She works in a post-abstract-expressionist mode of her own devising and encoding, a Benham style both familiar on impact but with new twists and whorls folded into the visual mix.
Her “Rhapsody” exhibition showcases more than two dozen paintings, exceeding the math of, say, Bach’s 24-piece Well-Tempered Clavier collection of pieces in all keys in major and minor. Consider the extras as bonus “sonatas.” The show’s installation itself conveys ideas which could relate to musical organization and thematic strategies. A group of three paintings—SBL 3, SBL 39 and SBL 40—behave as a like-minded triptych, all surging waves and funneling arabesques energizing the dark-hued compositions.
Other paintings veer in distinct directions, away from the artist’s dominant mode of expression. In one far corner of the space, a lightness of being prevails in SBU 36, with its vaporous yellow splashed against a background of sky blue, an altogether more introspective and lyrical image compared to the more action-oriented canvases in the room. Occasionally, Benham restricts her color palette to feature specific hues, as with the undulant purple void in SBU 20 and the warm bath of reds in SBE 21.
The Voice Gallery, located in the center of the large La Cumbre Plaza spread which has become a haven for galleries of the pop-up and lasting variety, is an open-feeling and generous host environment in contrast to the more hermetic atmosphere of the Faulkner. A peripheral advantage in the Plaza’s public interface allows her charismatic art to intersect with the property’s commercial agenda. Passerby can look through a side window and catch the pleasantly surprising sight of the general spectral splendors of SBE 39 and SBE 40, agreeable companions on the color/energy wheel.
In the open front room of the gallery/workspace, a series of five canvases greet visitors with a seemingly narrative flow of painterly statements. As if sequential variations on an unstated poetic theme, these paintings collectively draw us into an expressive and inquisitive zone. Venturing into potential areas of cosmic forces, abstract painting lineage and musical terrain, the art speaks for itself, while seeking out extra-art realms.
For Benham, the cross-talk of abstract art and music—the most abstract and ephemeral of arts, after all—involves registering a similarity of pulse and impulse. She has tended that relationship with a potent grace at The Voice.
(Josef Woodard is an arts journalist and critic, who has written on art for the Los Angeles Times, Artweek, Santa Barbara News-Press and Santa Barbara Independent, and various art catalogue essays. He has also written on music for DownBeat, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and other publications, and has two published jazz books and his first novel, Ladies Who Lunch, published in 2021. He is also a musician, who runs the label Household Ink Records.)
Music has been explicitly cited as a primary influence for such painters as Wasily Kandinsky and Stuart Davis and can implicitly be read into a vast array of art throughout history. And any implied musical character in the work of abstractionist painter Pamela Benham comes to the fore and comes clean, as it were, in her latest exhibition of exuberant canvases, under the telling title “Rhapsody: Chromatic Sonatas in Major and Minor Keys,” at Santa Barbara’s Voice Gallery.
Benham’s earlier exhibitions in Santa Barbara, in the public library’s Faulkner Gallery, have gone by other poetically suitable titles: “Visual Energy: Turning Up the Volume” in 2019 and “With Flying Colors” in 2022. This time out, the musical muse has paid an extended visit to her studio. Musical resonances and cross-references seem all the more embedded in her swirls of sensory energy and harmonic evanescence (“chromatic” alludes to both musical harmony and color itself).
Speaking of her studio, amidst the array of more than two dozen sizeable canvases in the voice gallery, we also find a remnant from her actual workspace. A large white drop cloth is speckled and spattered with paint, implying her natural action painting ways while in pursuit of her finished art.
Painting has been a dedicated, lived-in life’s work for the artist. Benham’s resume includes studies at NYC’s famed Cooper Union and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and she worked with Claes Oldenburg while in New York. Showing on the east coast and in Europe, Benham has also graced many galleries in her adopted home of Santa Barbara, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. She works in a post-abstract-expressionist mode of her own devising and encoding, a Benham style both familiar on impact but with new twists and whorls folded into the visual mix.
Her “Rhapsody” exhibition showcases more than two dozen paintings, exceeding the math of, say, Bach’s 24-piece Well-Tempered Clavier collection of pieces in all keys in major and minor. Consider the extras as bonus “sonatas.” The show’s installation itself conveys ideas which could relate to musical organization and thematic strategies. A group of three paintings—SBL 3, SBL 39 and SBL 40—behave as a like-minded triptych, all surging waves and funneling arabesques energizing the dark-hued compositions.
Other paintings veer in distinct directions, away from the artist’s dominant mode of expression. In one far corner of the space, a lightness of being prevails in SBU 36, with its vaporous yellow splashed against a background of sky blue, an altogether more introspective and lyrical image compared to the more action-oriented canvases in the room. Occasionally, Benham restricts her color palette to feature specific hues, as with the undulant purple void in SBU 20 and the warm bath of reds in SBE 21.
The Voice Gallery, located in the center of the large La Cumbre Plaza spread which has become a haven for galleries of the pop-up and lasting variety, is an open-feeling and generous host environment in contrast to the more hermetic atmosphere of the Faulkner. A peripheral advantage in the Plaza’s public interface allows her charismatic art to intersect with the property’s commercial agenda. Passerby can look through a side window and catch the pleasantly surprising sight of the general spectral splendors of SBE 39 and SBE 40, agreeable companions on the color/energy wheel.
In the open front room of the gallery/workspace, a series of five canvases greet visitors with a seemingly narrative flow of painterly statements. As if sequential variations on an unstated poetic theme, these paintings collectively draw us into an expressive and inquisitive zone. Venturing into potential areas of cosmic forces, abstract painting lineage and musical terrain, the art speaks for itself, while seeking out extra-art realms.
For Benham, the cross-talk of abstract art and music—the most abstract and ephemeral of arts, after all—involves registering a similarity of pulse and impulse. She has tended that relationship with a potent grace at The Voice.
(Josef Woodard is an arts journalist and critic, who has written on art for the Los Angeles Times, Artweek, Santa Barbara News-Press and Santa Barbara Independent, and various art catalogue essays. He has also written on music for DownBeat, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and other publications, and has two published jazz books and his first novel, Ladies Who Lunch, published in 2021. He is also a musician, who runs the label Household Ink Records.)