Artist Statement
I paint to make something from nothing: to communicate my visions to others; to put people where I have been. Like Anais Nin, I believe that art (writing, painting, music-----) provides us with the ‘anti toxins’ we need to live.
I paint because I want to record, communicate, recreate, create; an idea, experience, object, landscape or a feeling. I believe art whether it be painting, music, drama etc can lift us out of everyday routine. Participation is the key; the doing or the viewing or the listening.
“I strive to make beautiful and or challenging work.”
I enjoy putting things together; colours, shapes, lines; to make order from chaos. This involves decision making and when a work is going well there is a balance between freedom and control as the decision making becomes less conscious and more intuitive.
Biography
Jenny Bennett, was born McLellan in 1950, in Hastings, New Zealand, and had a rural childhood.
After attending Iona College she later graduated with an M.A. (Hons) anthropology, from Otago and Auckland Universities and moved to the city of Whangarei where she still lives.
Bennett began painting in 1976 after the birth of her first child, and has explored a wide range of media and techniques, print making, clay sculpture, puppetry / performance, flax weaving, pastel work and collage. Bennett’s first exhibition was in 1976 and she has continued to show nationally and internationally.
She and has won various art awards and commissions; and served on arts boards, judging panels and in mentoring programmes.
Bennett regards overseas travel as important and values viewing great art, architecture and history.
She participated in the Florence Biennale 2007, and the Chianciano Biennale in 2009, 2011 and 2015. Bennett has also taken part in the Power of Perception and Art Expo in New York.
After several years of exploring various themes, mainly landscapes, Bennett says it was exciting to begin a new series of exploring flora, involving new colours and abstraction; work for the London Biennale held in 2017. The recent Paisley series with its flowing organic imagery developed naturally from the floral series and the latest “Hot Flotsam”, a large work still in progress reflects an increasing interest in abstraction and an acknowledgement of global warming, pollution and mutation.
www.jennybennett.com
Art Critique
https://www.international-confederation-art-critics.org/jenny-bennett-critique
Jenny Bennett’s work is all pertinent to nature, a reality depicted by a scrupulous observer, a world that has a privileged relationship with Jenny. She observes, analyses and conceives works of art that the viewer immediately venerates.
Her balances compositions, meditative colours and unique contrasts have been envisioned by a sharp mind which reads in nature a great source of inspiration. The spectator is captured and moved by her black and white moonscapes in which her deepest mastery transpires. Bennett’s competence with primary colours originates masterpieces that bring the observer to admire remote and unknown worlds. At first glimpse, Bennett’s paintings can disclose anxiety, while at a more profound analysis become gracious horizons of inner peace. Faraway worlds appear closer and closer; aliens stones and massive boulders talk about a nature that only the trained eye of Jenny can perceive.
Fantastic compositions that suggest Jules Verne’s literature bring us back to the innermost memories of our early readings. Albeit, Bennett’s talent is discovered in admiring her flower compositions, her fragments of forest. Detailed paintings, meticulously conceived, from which a sense of tranquillity, but also of unrest and loneliness, transpire. The use of hues and the harmony between forms and shades enlighten and electrify Jenny’s work. Bennett desires to discover a world that she does not fully possess: an impenetrable universe full of boundaries that encourages us to decipher our subconscious and uncover our buried dilemmas.
Bennett is a complete and enigmatic artist with a unique creative expression that recalls the works by the Italian Antonio Ligabue, a genius in his agrestal masterpieces.
Inspecting her artworks, Emily Dickinson could state:
“To tell the Beauty would decrease
To state the Spell demean
There is a syllable-less Sea
Of which it is the sign”
Jenny Bennett is a great artist who lives in a world the viewer can only aspire to belong.
Timothy Warrington
International Confederation of Art Critics
Click to open files below:
Jenny Bennett the first 50 years
Jenny Bennett the second 50 years
