Carol Benson
My recent work, a series called Counterpanes, is a culmination of several longtime interests: traditional ‘women’s work’ (the largely unsung handmade projects that females created in the home); color interplay; patterns and puzzles; our surroundings, natural and urban. I begin each piece by making a rough, spontaneous drawing on gessoed paper, working out an asymmetric grid. Then I further divide the sections, designing a balance which also suggests movement, perhaps a musicality. I piece the composition together with oil paint colors, not unlike the process of making a ‘crazy quilt’.
Work from the past few years involved cutting, piecing, and sewing sections of raw canvas left over from other artists’ projects, from which I made large three-dimensional wall constructions, painted with oil. The Counterpane works are a continuation of those works, in a sense.
During the pandemic, I made a series of 128 large drawings with watercolor crayons (mostly working black on white) which I called Corona Chronicle. These meditative, expressive works drew upon the uncertainty of the times and the bombardment of
information we faced every day in the form of graphs, charts, numbers, and evolving facts.
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