Drifting With Nature

The pictorial arts have taken myriad and diverse forms over the ages and the themes inspiring them are countless. Yet, the relationship with Nature has been constant and preeminent across the planet, ever since the cave drawings of prehistory.  Flash forward to our modern and postmodern present, in which our interactions with the natural world run the gamut from ecstasy to scorn, from reverence to savage exploitation.

How should painters today envision this immemorial yet urgent relationship in their inspirational representations ?

Jan Rowland and Danielle Bensky have associated their joyous creative talents to venture toward painterly responses :  In the offerings of Jan, emanating the secret aura of flowerage, Nature's subtle drift is to reinvest human arenas, abodes conceived to rather ensure separation and spatial autonomy.  With those of Danielle, however, Nature consents to enter a symbiosis with depiction of the uniquely human, conjuring forms of dreams, carnaval or mythology.

In both cases, our defining gaze is delicately thrown into question and we who contemplate these paintings are invited to reconceptualize our place within the natural universe.

Artist statement

Why do I paint ? What am I trying to achieve ?

I can truthfully say that painting is my very personal way of passing along the silent language of reality as I perceive, encounter and experience it.

My work is not at all engendered by concepts, which is why I have fondness for the Surrealists. Their founding poet, Andre Breton, speaking of his own process, said that "words came knocking" at his window pane as he was writing. By analogy, this is what happens to me in my studio : on days when I’m lucky, forms, themes and colours come knocking or dancing on my skylight, demanding to be admitted and welcomed.

This is why I am so fond of symbiosis and metamorphosis, in which an external element - notably trees - will be transmuted by a poetic encounter with a female spirit figure, no doubt some secret persona deep in my psyche yearning for expression. The result will be a movement toward suggestions of the symbolic, not as initial intention but by happenstance, an unexpected encounter somewhere on the road less traveled.

Like the unfurling of a story, yes, a narrative symbolism in which we the viewers become narrators setting in motion our own memories and imagination.

Danielle Bensky.