PAMELA BENHAM  Artist / Painter
  • Paintings
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  • Retrospective
  • Exhibitions
  • Reviews
    • Expressive Forces in Flight by Josef Woodard
    • Painting Into and Out of the Vortex by Josef Woodard
    • CASA Magazine Paintings/Pamela Benham
    • Santa Barbara News-Press Peripheral Visions Exhibit
    • Santa Barbara News-Press COLOR X 6 Exhibition
  • About
  • Contact
 
 
Artist Statement
Painting brings me to give shape to those lingering, 
persistent emotions that are sensed, yet still not recognized.  

They may have taken up their restless waiting 
after a confusing incident, a passionate exchange, 
seeing something upsetting, or witnessing a sublimely tender event.  

I paint now without needing to know where I’m going. I begin with no plan, no sketches,
no preconception. I look at the colors laid out on my pallets and feel an inclination toward one, a leaning, an attraction – and it begins. A mark is made, and the next in relation to
​the first, and so forth and so on.
 
This method is both quiet and fervent, creative and destructive. I apply layers and
wipe them off until I am moved into that intuitive nonverbal flow where the expression
of the subconscious begins and the emotional content arrives. In this state, I work from
a vocabulary honed from years of painting from nature and studying other artists' works.  Color and tone, line and shape, edges and paint, thick and thin form compositions in 2D and 3D space.  And then when the painting’s all done, like Agnes Martin, I ask my brain, ‘Well – what do you think?’

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