The components of any successful work of art are assembled from a rich, diverse life – one driven by intellectual curiosity and enriched by accumulated skill and discipline. But when it comes to doing the work, I’ve found that my own success depends on forsaking both method and intellect; it has to come from the gut.

I paint in part from a pure love of the physical stuff of the medium. I believe in paint’s capacity to tease out the substance of my life's experience as I lay it down. What I know of the world becomes fixed in that material in such a way that the qualities of my understanding, if not its exact contents, become available to those who look at my pictures after they leave my hands. In that subjective act of looking – without being told exactly what to see – the viewer comes to own the work as much as its maker. That is the essential purpose of my art, and of all the works of other painters, both past and present, that move me most profoundly.

 

Christopher Benson, Santa Fe, 2009