British painter Dan Bennett creates works bursting with vibrant floral forms
Artist Dan Bennett paints floral motifs in his studio in East Sussex.
As a teenager, British painter Dan Bennett found himself weeding flowerbeds for pocket money. These days, at just 36 years of age, he carefully tends canvases bursting in floral forms, where a similar ideal of edited restraint allows his graphic and energetic visions to shine forth. They capture the attention of gallery directors and art collectors in both the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as stationers, fabric designers, and product designers worldwide.
Perhaps some readers are familiar with his note cards, journals, diaries, or calendars for publishing brand teNeues or the fabrics from Westminster Fibers. Later this year, his painting Cosmos 4 will be issued as a poster for IKEA. It seems his bold and colorful paintings evoke a message that is at once modern, primitive, and universal.
And though universal means of communication stoke his imagination, he didn’t set out to take on both the art world and the marketplace at large. It was the art world and the garden that ignited his work. Armed with a fine arts degree from the University of Leeds, Bennett found himself taking jobs that would allow him to straddle two vocations: first a tree surgeon, where sitting 40 feet high in the arms of an ancient oak provided an unusual vantage point on the ground below; then as a gardener, maintaining a glasshouse at the Newhaven Botanic Gardens, where the meditative acts of tending to rare and exotic plants left him enough energy to paint in his free time. And then, owing to his capricious nature, he says, he became a self-employed gardener, maintaining private gardens in Brighton. “Whenever it was too wet, cold, or dark to work in the gardens, I was able to work on my latest painting,” he says.
Spirals, dots, and geometric patterns evoke aboriginal art, as in Bennett’s Pericallis (24 inches by 20 inches, 2007, acrylic on canvas).
Once he made the leap to full-time painting, however, his characteristic style began to take root. “I began to realize that if I painted just 10 percent of my usual forms and then stopped, the end result would be much more pleasing,” he says. “I had an almost irrational fear of empty spaces within my work, but once my confidence began to grow, I soon realized that these empty areas were the perfect foil to set off my colors and patterns. This is when plants began to form out of the chaos. It was as if the years I had spent handling and nurturing plants had given me an intuitive knowledge of their inner workings. Having watched them bud, bloom, wither, and die throughout the shifting seasons, I now had the ability to represent their intrinsic nature in paint and capture their beauty,” he says.
Bennett’s bold paintings of flowers and plants make use of motifs that are reminiscent of those in aboriginal artwork. “Australian dot paintings, Native American rock drawings, Peruvian geoglyphs, African body art, and European cave paintings all share an underlying obsession with simple geometric patterns,” he says. “Dots, arcs, grids, parallel and meandering lines, zig zags, circles, spirals, and dashes seem to form a universal primal language. These are the same forms that I see when examining a curled frond about to unfurl or the spread-open petals of a vibrant flower.”
Bennett’s artist representative Blair Clarke, a native of Columbus, Georgia, who now calls New York home, says she was immediately mesmerized by Bennett’s work. “His paintings are so uplifting and happy, but his style is quite methodical and meticulous,” she says. “My husband is a keen gardener, so it was interesting to me to see how Dan interpreted the garden and flowers with his extraordinary sense of color and intricate brush strokes.”
As for Bennett himself, the varieties of mass reproduction that take his designs into homes worldwide are an unexpected blessing. “I find it deeply rewarding, knowing that so many people can enjoy my view of the natural world,” he says.
“It took a great deal of self-confidence for me to begin to leave blank, untouched areas of the canvas,” the artist says of works such as Viola 2 (20 inches by 24 inches, 2007, acrylic on canvas).
For more information, visit www.dan-bennett.co.uk or contact Voltz Clarke at 917.449.9936 or www.voltzclarke.com.
