Mark Bennion: Frescos from the Island

MARK BENNION FRESCOS FROM THE ISLAND SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2018

My work has always been about the uncovering of an ancient innocence.

It is about a simple geometry that interacts with the changing world that is around us and is within us.

The paintings express two different ways of looking at the natural world, both highly abstract. One is an impression of simple shapes floating in negative space created by layers of transparency. The others are sensitive gestures taken from details in nature against layers of color, one on top of the other.

Mist, rain, clouds, twigs, branches, small leaves become the visual fodder for abstract images, suggesting meditations and thoughts about time and memory. These sensitive works allow a viewer to ruminate and meditate, to spend time lost in a very special world.

Mark Bennion (2018)

Untitled (fresco) 2012 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 42 x 42 inches

Untitled (fresco) 2011 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 42 x 42 inches

Untitled (fresco) 2011 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 42 x 42 inches

Untitled (fresco) 2012 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 42 x 42 inches

Untitled (fresco) 2010 3 panels

oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 30 x 10 inches each

Untitled (fresco) 2014 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 28 x 28 inches

Untitled (fresco) 2014 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 28 x 28 inches

Untitled (fresco) 2014 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 28 x 28 inches

Untitled (fresco) 2013 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 28 x 28 inches

Untitled (fresco) 2012 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 20 x 30 inches

"Shadow Series" 2015 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 20 x 20 inches

"Shadow Series" 2015 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 20 x 20 inches

"Shadow Series" 2015 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 20 x 20 inches

"Shadow Series" 2015 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 20 x 20 inches

"Shadow Series" 2015 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 20 x 20 inches

Untitled (fresco) 2014 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 12 x 12 inches

Untitled (fresco) 2014 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 12 x 12 inches

Untitled (fresco) 2005 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 12 x 12 inches

Untitled (fresco) 2015 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 11 x 11 inches

Untitled (fresco) 2015 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 11 x 11 inches

Untitled (fresco) 2015 oil, dry pigment and ink on canvas or panel 11 x 11 inches

Wordless Stories, The Art of Mark Bennion Obelisks and towers that stand timelessly and point inexorably upwards from an inner ground that doesn't bother to alter time or resist rust. Timeless altars continually arising and pointing to an unseen, but firmly sensed origin.

Here the issue is 'art from the recesses of the self' handled by crafts earned in the world of metals and rust and acids and cloth.

Made from hands that have always made things, always sought the knowledge of things and the devotion inherent in the substance of the world. Hands that learned boat-building because it knows no straight lines and can feed a family from shapes that mimic the curves from the sea. Unsheltered learning that sees craft in the weather and rust and notices time stippling art in the things of the world.

Hands that feel their way through a journey of willing blindness, trying to see into the world to that which sustains it, through the world to that which is within it. A journey that keeps beginning in silence and the stirring of shapes arising from the innermost self as in a silence that shifts to sound, at first quietly, then rising to hold light and shadow for a long time.

Meditative shapes seeking mineral memories and bone-grown images.

Galvanic textures with intimate curves that keep announcing the breaking edges of silence. A staunch song of shapes that offer themselves, familiar like trees and mountains able to mark each day and withstand the night.

Painting that cycle back and transit forth through a ground of existence that includes both the future and the past. Wordless stories that invite reverie, that lean and stretch the imagination and angle towards meaning.

Paint and plaster that fix little moments on paper, like moments that the inner mind knows in solitude, that allow meanings to enter or escape. Parts of cyclical wheels that appear as if the cover of Nature was worn away to reveal shapes of the world behind the world. Puzzle-like arrangements of towers and circles on fields of cracked ground that invite us to find our own history amongst them.

Nature, caught standing pensively behind the scenery, before it breaks into softer forms. More archetypical than abstract; architectural remnants of thought and insight. Like Seven bells as in Buddhist stories that extoll the seven stages of understanding. Or, three towers inviting us to name their meaning and climb to another knowledge.

Mystery evoked from some bone knowledge of the world of forms. Weather captured as a texture that might be watermarks on the walls of the soul. Or, on massive ancient walls that are trying to speak again. Towers and altars born of years of meditation and centering practices. Totems that grow from silence and chanting, centering through pain and polishing and sanding.

Shaping centers as cycles through practice and art. Oxidation and ordination combining stainless centers with rusting exteriors in a dance that mimics life and the effect of time on all the shapes of the world. Oxidation hinting at the wordless telling of beads of truth that ever elude the quicker forms of life.

Unfolding, explicating, extruding from metal and steel, images of a timeless, stainless center. Totems that stand with the 'presence of being' rusting into time the timeless postures of the self. 'I beams' that arrest the determination of the inner I to exist and persist and remember an 'ancient innocence' of form.

Michael Meade (September 2001)

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