Willimantic Chronicle by Janice Steinhagen, December 21, 2000

From "Different Styles: Harry and Thomas Bennett Show at RiverSea Gallery" written by Mike Strom published in the Astoria Review, September 2005.

Thomas Bennett, brought up in his father's studios in Connecticut, started drawing at an early age. "I always wanted to be an artist; my oldest recollections are of time spent in the studio painting alongside my father. He taught me how to paint without imposing any style on me." Leaving home, Tom went to the University of Connecticut where he earned a BFA and learned how to think as a painter. Thomas' work, as exhibited at RiverSea side by side with his father's, is quite different. Harry's paintings seem to vibrate with an almost-Degas quality about them; embedded is an intriguing humor, an obvious remnant from his experience in painting book jackets. Meanwhile, Thomas' have a heavy classical feel; swift sure strokes and dynamic composition that loudly proclaims its solidity. "I like to indulge the subconcious, walking that fine line between childish wonder and logical control," he said.

After college, and short stint as a cab driver, Tom decided not to go for his MFA and went to Europe, settling in Spain where he found a studio in Barcelona and set to painting. In Barcelona he was able to rent an apartment for $85 a month just a few blocks from the beach and the cafes where he would met other expatriot artists. "I've heard everything has changed now," he explained.

While in Barcelona he took part in group shows and had two one-man shows; however, pending business called him back to the East. He returned to New York and he moved to the Willamsburg section of Brooklyn before its regentrification and the influx of artists. "I got in at the right time, before the prices skyrocketed," he said. Thomas married at 43 and works half the year doing illustration and shows his work in galleries in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the RiverSea Gallery in Astoria. "Though I'm strongly influenced by my classical training, I love pushing the medium around. Motion is essential. I'm always thinking about how muscles and forms can almost connect."

The following is an excerpt from an article written by Janice Steinhagen based on an interview with Thomas Bennett published in the Willimantic Chronicle on December 21, 2000.

Talk for long with Thomas Bennett about his art, and you'll hear him repeatedly, unself-consciously, refer to what he does as "pushing images around." Look for some time at his work, however, and the movement of the medium becomes palpable.

Bennett, a 1982 alumnus of University of Connecticut School of Fine Arts, is currently showing his monotypes and oil paintings in "Animals and Other People" at the Jorgensen Auditorium's lower level gallery. The work is all figurative, dominated by the striking series of horses in motion.

"The idea of motion came about because of the medium itself," Bennett explained. "I love activity in images." Not surprisingly, the spontaneity of monoprinting (creating an image directly on a printing plate, yielding a single print) attracted him during his undergrad days at UConn.

"I discovered the medium, and I loved it--it's much like painting. I don't have a lot of patience with my work; I have to see results immediately." Using oil-based printing inks on plexiglass, Bennett found that he could literally push the image around, retaining the sense of momentum in the finished print.

But the medium had one drawback: a limited scale. "I'd been working with oil paint since I was a child, and I preferred it to any other medium," he said. "I was trying to find a way to achieve that kind of malleability (inherent in monotype) and trying to expand the scale."

"Nude in Doorway"

Bennett said he chose dogs and horses as subjects not out of any particular equine or canine fondness, but because he appreciated their innate sense of movement. The photography of Edward Muybridge, who captured both human and animal figures in motion in his early stop-action photo sequences, also served as something of an inspiration, he said.

Bennett's animal forms, built up of sweeping strokes of ink or paint, are distorted, blurred and elongated as they race headlong across the paper or board. Most are composed of dark neutrals, primarily black, sometimes with bands of color above or below to suggest an environment. Occasionally lines are incised in the paint to add details like a harness. One striking image, "Chien Blanc," depicts a sinister-looking cat seemingly caught in the moment after landing a leap: the slightly crouched limbs are blurred, the head lowered and the ears back. There's a sense of threat in the animal's stance. The dog images tend toward the threatening also, with plenty of bared teeth.

The show also features Bennett's figure and portrait paintings and prints. The nudes share with the animal images a dark and foreboding palette and a sense of spontaneous creation. "Nude Landscape" leaves the styrene bare white for the skin surfaces of the cropped female torso, swirling dark neutrals around the limbs and neck. Other more "finished" looking paintings still retain quick brushstrokes and sketchiness, sometimes even drips. Where Bennett does use color in his figures, it tends toward the heated orange-red end of the spectrum, dramatizing the contrast with the dark surroundings.

Concerning the tendency to darkness, Bennett said "It's hard to say that there's anything conscious going on there. I suppose I have a kind of cynical, dark sense of humor." Or, he added, it may be the influence of his artist father, a painter who once did a series of dark illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy."

While Bennett's portraits are less "dark," they still tend toward a sallow green undertone that gives the viewer the impression that something's ever so slightly amiss. The greenish palette gives the exuberant laughing subject in "That's Not Funny" an ominous sense of laughing inappropriately. The unsettled atmosphere also haunts his self-portraits, in which his face is averted from the viewer.