Pamela Benham : Music of the Hues
Essay by Shana Nys Dambrot
Pamela Benham’s artistic journey began in transcendence. With a grounding in dance and a visceral approach to representation on the canvas, her pictorialism always contained the seeds of the gestural abstraction that would soon give form to her truest voice. Even during her training at rigorous and rewarding programs including Cooper Union, Art Students’ League, Ecole des Beaux Arts, and Skowhegan, she sought after something more essential, something beyond convention. Her sweeping landscapes, eccentric still lifes, and intimately vulnerable portraits continued to evolve, imbued with a strange, electric energy that came not only from observation of the world, but from a deeper experience of existing in it.
As her later paintings went increasingly beyond the outward appearance of her subject, her work moved inexorably toward a somatic, psychical, and even spiritual essence, in a distillation of raw feeling still being translated through her, onto the canvas. As representational elements receded, Benham’s practice fully embraced a profound flowstate exploration of form, color, and line as conduits for pure emotion. Seeking, she experiments with a range of painterly techniques—feathering, throwing, brushing, and blending pigment to opulent effect. Her chromatic lexicon also expands and refines, empowering vibrant hues or exploring more subtle tonal resonances.
Evoking a more prismatic, ethereal dynamic of abstract expressionism, her newest work—especially the mesmerizing Chromatic Sonatas series—speaks a visual language of unique color constellations, shapes, and marks that serve as a conduit for her emotions and ideas—but not only hers. A sort of synesthetic empath, Benham is also attuned to the swirling energies of her community, and the world at large.
Notably, Benham organizes her paintings—and serially choreographs their display—by emotional temperature. As the works progress and interplay, the viewer is guided on intentional journeys of emotion and psyche that mirror the artist’s own. Warm yellows and oranges might thrum with joy, while cool blues and purples whisper of introspection, the sky and sea; red signals passion, anger or even danger; blacker hues bring mystery. All of them contain the evidence of the artist’s attuned presence as an aspect of their meaning, echoing Wassily Kandinsky's theories on the inherent emotive power of color, along with Lee Krasner’s love of pigment’s insistent physicality.
As the works unfurl their symphonic depths—in the pictorial space and in the mind and body, too—all of that energy lives in Benham’s muscle memory, her sensitive translations of feeling into musicality, movement, and composition. She intentionally does not plan her paintings beforehand. Instead, she chooses a color, intuitively, and begins working in a flowstate, continuing until the piece, and the psyche, feel resolved in a way that fully embraces the complexities of our shared humanity. To experience these works is to be invited to share in that intimate and universal space as well.
—Shana Nys Dambrot
Los Angeles, 2024
As her later paintings went increasingly beyond the outward appearance of her subject, her work moved inexorably toward a somatic, psychical, and even spiritual essence, in a distillation of raw feeling still being translated through her, onto the canvas. As representational elements receded, Benham’s practice fully embraced a profound flowstate exploration of form, color, and line as conduits for pure emotion. Seeking, she experiments with a range of painterly techniques—feathering, throwing, brushing, and blending pigment to opulent effect. Her chromatic lexicon also expands and refines, empowering vibrant hues or exploring more subtle tonal resonances.
Evoking a more prismatic, ethereal dynamic of abstract expressionism, her newest work—especially the mesmerizing Chromatic Sonatas series—speaks a visual language of unique color constellations, shapes, and marks that serve as a conduit for her emotions and ideas—but not only hers. A sort of synesthetic empath, Benham is also attuned to the swirling energies of her community, and the world at large.
Notably, Benham organizes her paintings—and serially choreographs their display—by emotional temperature. As the works progress and interplay, the viewer is guided on intentional journeys of emotion and psyche that mirror the artist’s own. Warm yellows and oranges might thrum with joy, while cool blues and purples whisper of introspection, the sky and sea; red signals passion, anger or even danger; blacker hues bring mystery. All of them contain the evidence of the artist’s attuned presence as an aspect of their meaning, echoing Wassily Kandinsky's theories on the inherent emotive power of color, along with Lee Krasner’s love of pigment’s insistent physicality.
As the works unfurl their symphonic depths—in the pictorial space and in the mind and body, too—all of that energy lives in Benham’s muscle memory, her sensitive translations of feeling into musicality, movement, and composition. She intentionally does not plan her paintings beforehand. Instead, she chooses a color, intuitively, and begins working in a flowstate, continuing until the piece, and the psyche, feel resolved in a way that fully embraces the complexities of our shared humanity. To experience these works is to be invited to share in that intimate and universal space as well.
—Shana Nys Dambrot
Los Angeles, 2024