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Chris Bennett
Chris Bennett was born in London in 1957 and studied at the Slade
School of Fine Art in the early 80s under Euan Uglow, Geoffrey
Camp and Phil Sutton. He has exhibited regularly at the Royal
Academy Summer Show and with the Royal Institute of Oil Painters
at the Mall Galleries, London. His current works are to be seen
in prestigious galleries around the UK.
A notable commission is a portrait of Sir William Hawthorne,
now in the collection of Churchill College, Cambridge who, with
Sir Frank Whittle, designed the first jet engine. Chris paints
an internal world, a distillation of something seen or half glimpsed
in life, which is digested and later realised as a formal image;
he is painting an ideal, not an idea. The paintings are the outcome
of giving an external shape to an internal experience.
Looking back at his pictures, Chris recognizes the events that
occur in them and remembers them taking place before him, the
way one remembers the first meeting with people whom one comes
to love most dearly.
To give pictorial expression to these events is what guides these
paintings to their realisations. For Chris, there must always
be a seed, the grain of sand in the oyster which symbolises what
is most important in the artists eyes, that is alive and continues
to live in oneself as the picture is born and grows.
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