With quick brushstrokes, Tom Bennett creates representational images of human figures and animals, emphasizing movement in a manner reminiscent of Edgar Degas and the photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Elongated and blurry, the horse racing up a hill (Canter Fritz, 2002) and the cat sinisterly landing a leap (Chien Blanc, 1998) elicit a sense of foreboding enhanced by Bennett’s somber palette; his female figures too reflect a grim sense of humor with their distorted nude bodies. The face of Untitled Figure (1997), for example, is obscured by layers of dark paint. Classically trained as a painter, he initially worked in oil on canvas but discovered that monotype printing enabled him to “literally push the image around,” creating an essential element of motion. To overcome the limited scale of monotypes, however, he switched to painting on slick-surfaced plastic.
With quick brushstrokes, Tom Bennett creates representational images of human figures and animals, emphasizing movement in a manner reminiscent of Edgar Degas and the photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Elongated and blurry, the horse racing up a hill (Canter Fritz, 2002) and the cat sinisterly landing a leap (Chien Blanc, 1998) elicit a sense of foreboding enhanced by Bennett’s somber palette; his female figures too reflect a grim sense of humor with their distorted nude bodies. The face of Untitled Figure (1997), for example, is obscured by layers of dark paint. Classically trained as a painter, he initially worked in oil on canvas but discovered that monotype printing enabled him to “literally push the image around,” creating an essential element of motion. To overcome the limited scale of monotypes, however, he switched to painting on slick-surfaced plastic.
