ArtistBenichou

profile_location

City where you live

Malibu Hills

State or Region

California

Country where you live

USA

Personal Information

Tell Us A little About Yourself

I was led to becoming an artist through a spiritual quest that began when I was a child and crystallized in the mid to late 1990’s. I never consciously intended to paint. I have always been intensely fascinated by the innermost workings of the universe, both physical and spiritual. I find keen similarities between the vastness of the expanding cosmos and freedom of mind and being.

My work is an extension and a clarification of my strongest, clearest and most intimate creative thinking. I am convinced that what I manifest in physical form as an artist is but a dim reflection of what my spirit is capable of creating. With a clear risk of sounding naively utopian, I believe we are here to manifest life and help each other discover our intrinsic freedom. I trust that we all play a role in the great scheme and mystery of life.

I see myself as a mystic and understand art as the channeling of a creative realm I no longer wish to resist. I see the physical realm as a communication platform for higher consciousness. I am deeply grateful to artists who have exposed their thoughts on life and art; writing is an enormous aspect of my life as an artist. I believe the artist has the divine duty to keep one foot in the mysteries of creation, thus preventing man to be completed engulfed in civilization.

My work is for the most part expressive: abstract and abstract expressionist with an intense and free use of color. I use various media to produce unusual textures, shapes, compositions and color coordination. I believe color has a primitive healing effect provided it contains and aims at harmony.

I do not paint from thought projections or left-brain imagery, as I prefer to leave my conscious self as removed from the process as possible. Color and line engender shapes that eventually lead me to a harmony of composition, which I reckon is the ultimate purpose. I don’t lean toward representational work as I view the world as a dance of mirage-like manifestations and appearances. Self-based versus mind-based art is to me where my truth lies.

My spirit has ways of seeing that my eyes cannot comprehend. I find soothing peace when I escape the world of accepted forms and favor expressing myself freely and openly. Creative imagination and spiritual reflection through the act of painting is the closest I get to formlessness without limits. To work with the un-interpreted, and yet engender clarity, freedom and consequently a dim but present sense of evolution through intuitive awareness.

Painting to me IS thinking in action, profound and on all levels but it is also an honoring and celebration of existence in all its forms and colors.

Living in a political, delicate and sensitive world, I must participate in the process of completely consuming the atmospheres around me in order to process them artistically. My paintings are like books and maps. I “write” so much in them. I journey like a guided vessel through rich internal experiences removed from the psychological babbling of the “real” world.

History

Member for

1 year 7 weeks