Trudy Benson
1 collaboration
Benson’s paintings have a refreshingly determined viewpoint: the artist’s hand is more powerful than the digital image. Her works combine aesthetics from early image software like Microsoft Paint, with her hand-made abstraction. Her loud painterly style hinges on layer upon layer of texture, which simultaneously harmonise and fight against each other. Sumptuously thick oil paint is squeezed directly out of the tube and slapped across her canvases, and odd colour combinations mix together. Crisp edges of irregular shapes contrast against loose, messy patterning that references the childlike essence of naïve painting, as well as the purposeful chaos of post-war abstraction. In an age where the consumption of visual culture is predominantly via the flat plane of digital imagery, the excessive texture and contrast in Benson’s paintings is a fervent call to experience art in person.