Christopher Benson
About the Artist
Christopher Benson was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1960 and grew up in nearby Newport. From 1975 to 1979 he attended the Woodstock Country School in South Woodstock, Vermont where he met his first and most formative painting teacher and mentor, Peter Devine. He is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and a two-time winner of the Pollock-Krasner Painting Fellowship.
Benson’s work – which traverses a variety of idioms, from landscape, seascape, architectural and figurative genre scenes, to both expressionistic and formalist abstraction – all descends from a long line of Modern European and American painters with an affinity for gestural brushwork and bright, often luminous color. While there are a great many other painters who have inspired his work, Benson feels a particular kinship to George Bellows’ early twentieth century urban realism and to the expressionistic paint-handling of Willem deKooning and Richard Diebenkorn.
Benson has exhibited his oil paintings, both his realism and abstractions, in galleries and museums throughout the United States – especially in New England, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the southwestern states of New Mexico and Arizona. Most recently, in the summer of 2022, he had a two-person show at the North Dakota Museum of Art with the Rhode Island painter Sue McNally, and he is scheduled for a solo exhibit in October of 2023 at the Museum of the Southwest in Midland, Texas.