Michael Bennett
Born Manchester 27th September 1948
1966-1969 BA hons. Birmingham School of Art
1970-1971 MA Slade School
1972-1973 Fellowship Cheltenham
1966-1969 BA hons. Birmingham School of Art
1970-1971 MA Slade School
1972-1973 Fellowship Cheltenham
An Essay on Michael Bennett
by Christopher Bucklow
The best art can often quite literally stun the viewer. It seems to have the effect of switching the mental systems that produce language onto ‘hold’. Indeed, in front of the best paintings, I frequently find that I have no interest in analytical or conceptual thinking at all. I find myself compelled only to look and to engage with the image on what feels to be a broader wavelength than that on which my logical, conscious thoughts habitually operate. And yet during this period of the ‘stun’, there is a sensation of profound understanding and a sympathy which produces a powerful, connected knowing. At this time I feel sure that some other kind of conceptual language has come into play, one that makes my normal consciousness feel limited and restricted. Needless to say, I mention these things because I have often felt such feelings in front of Michael Bennett’s new paintings. They involve me. Indeed, such is their effect, I could almost write that word ‘involve’ in capital letters, for I am ‘involved’ very deeply - both by them, and with them, and indeed ‘in’ them.
One example of this ‘involving’ is the sense I have that I am the tree in each image of the single tree series. In a sense, psychologically, I leave the studio space and enter the image. I am made to feel this especially keenly when I afterwards look at the ‘Sanctuary’ series, with its deep atmospheric backgrounds and column-like tree trunk in the immediate foreground; for here I am most definitely not the tree, and am surprised to become myself again, returned to standing on the studio floor, once more an observer of the work. This, then, is one example of the kind of involving I have in mind, and yet I am sure there is much more to this phenomenon of the ‘stun’.
Other examples arise out of the formal and surface qualities of the work. The handling of the paint is extremely sensual, and yet the surface is never just surface, for there is always evocative illusion too. Perceptions biased towards one or the other reading - towards surface or window - depend to some extent on my psychological position; but both are equally involving. As the tree - that is when I have become the tree - I feel the envelopment of the differing lights and atmospheres with which the artist enshrouds this personage, and I am thus involved in the magic of the illusion. On the other hand, as myself - as I am when viewing the ‘Sanctuary’ paintings - I become involved in the arrangement of the areas of paint - the composition. Simultaneously, of course this arrangement of depicted forms is the illusory landscape, which I cannot help but enter. But the sheer variety of form and light and colour, and variety of imagined entry into the spaces of the image that Michael Bennett offers is an extremely full experience. This formal level is another level, then, on which I become compellingly involved - a level which again produces the effect of enlarging my experience of the work beyond the confines of my logical, language-producing systems; temporarily stunned as they become as I become seduced by the illusion and the surface that creates it. This brings us close to a unique aspect of the works as a series. For the experience of comparison between the individual paintings produces a heightened awareness of the emotional qualities of each. This is not unlike the experience of music, each note or chord taking its precise feel from its neighbours. In Michael Bennett’s case, of course, we are free to compose our own sequences of feeling as our eyes range across the many images that make up each piece. From my studio, immediately below his, I know that he plays a lot of solo piano CDs as he works, and yet the density of the sensory experience of these paintings puts me in mind of fully orchestrated symphonic music, for there is a largeness of experience which suggests the performance of a full orchestra at its most powerful. I also have to say here that for me it is hard to step back from the individual paintings to view the series as a whole on the wall, and yet when I do I see that the artist has also been actively involved in shaping it as a single entity. But such is the power of the individual units, such is their allure, as surfaces, as illusions, as compositions in themselves and in comparison with the memory traces of their neighbours, I am unwilling to step back and ‘out’ of the flow of the sounding of each individual ‘note’ of the work. And in this the series are also like music, for only in memory can one recreate an entire symphony at a simultaneous moment in time, as an imaginative whole, and as one does so - as with these paintings - one is acutely aware of being ‘outside’ the work. For me at least, I am then immediately drawn ‘step forward’ again, and to re-enter the experience the individual seeing- which then takes on some of the temporal quality of music.
I have been fortunate to see the growth of these works - often on a daily basis - since they began in 2005. I have also been lucky enough to sometimes sit in the studio as they are painted. What strikes one immediately is how great a change in emotional experience a single stroke of the brush has within an image. Admittedly, as the three-inch wide brushes he uses are a significant fraction of the horizontal dimension of each painting, a single stroke covers a wide area, and yet even the slightest dulling or brightening of a hue or tone does produce a wide change in the experience of the image. I should also add that it is hard to be an observer of these changes because they come thick and fast. For Michael Bennett paints very quickly, and there appears to be little consideration of what he is about to do or has just done. Some other instinct than consideration seems to guide the progress of the image. To the outside observer, already in love with what is there on the canvas (even if it is only fleetingly there) the headlong cascade of change seems reckless, even dangerous, risky at every turn, and yet as the pauses in the process attest, even if much that was stunning is lost as it is covered with a new layer of paint, the final product is always a net gain. To the studio observer this process is deeply impressive; for the artist seems to have entered another state. This confirms what I have long suspected about Michael Bennett’s activity; he seems to be addicted to the state of mind I have been describing; it is the activity of painting that he craves - not the finished product (and I have seen him destroy hundreds of large finished paintings, months of work, as if they were the dry residue of a living process that he values much more). In a sense this state of mind is a makers version of the ‘stun’ produced in the onlooker, for it appears (and he himself confirms it in conversation) to involve a broad or even total engagement with the work in progress, one that temporarily switches off the critical and language-producing systems of the mind. There seems to be no remove, no conscious watching of the self engage with the work, but rather an instinctual sureness which suggest that other systems than the conscious guide the progress of the image. Michael Bennett has told me that there is something deathlike about a painting finished, and in this way we might see his addiction to the activity of painting as an addiction to living itself.
Being close to the place where these works are created I have also been privileged to talk to him about his own feelings and thoughts on the work. Despite my awareness of the vital life-addiction he exhibits, and despite my own feelings of life-enhancing involvement in the paintings, both of which, with a little more reflection, might have alerted me to the prospect that only a keen awareness of non-life, of death, of non-being could produce such a powerful embracing of life, I was surprised to learn that he himself feels that the works are melancholy, indeed that they are informed throughout by a sense of loss. Perhaps this is a feeling of impending loss, as an artist approaching his 60th year feels that time now is not ‘unlimited’, but is surely limited and must be well used and savoured. I would also suppose that, mixed in with this, there may also be a sense of the loss of former youth. Certainly a deep awareness of time, or rather the spending of time, seems to be implied in his placing of so much importance on the transient effects of light and atmosphere. Michael Bennett once told me “While it might be nice to be alive on a clear Spring day, it is not something which I identify with, I can’t use it as a metaphor.” We should now turn our attention to the metaphoric aspect of his whole activity.
I am certain that all the things that go into the making of each landscape image, are in fact metaphors of his own life. Not only the individual tree, but also the flux of the atmosphere is metaphoric. In this sense, the landscape is human, is him, the artist, and he will readily admit, in conversation, that the single tree is indeed himself. In this way it is possible to see that the play of light and the movement of cloud or mist around the forms is a metaphor for what it is like to be a feeling consciousness - a soul or psyche - in the flow of a lifetime. I was initially surprised to learn from him that he could never include a human object - be it house or lane in the images. But soon I realised that this pristine nature is in itself a metaphor of human life for him - or more precisely his preferred kind of life. For if the landscape is himself in such important ways, the interest in inviolate landscape is in fact a reflection or metaphor of his individuality, his native self, one unaffected by the modes of human opinion and fashion that surround us in a culture. In this way the individual tree, becomes not only a depiction of what it means to survive through time (though one notes that all the trees are essentially ‘young’ ones, being “fifty to sixty” years old) but also an indication of a determined individuality in the face of the changing atmospheres of fashion and taste in art theory and aesthetics, and indeed the moral positions that they themselves ultimately symbolise. Michael Bennett says of trees, that he sees in them a certain “dignity” and that they have “been around as long or longer than us”; that they “still exist, however much we have done to the world”. My own interpretation of such statements tends towards the psychological, and in order to understand them I would tentatively rephrase them in my own mind to mean that the artist has a relationship to an inner core of his person that is inviolate, that has not been colonised by the culture that pours into us as we enter, as children, the human world of society. This inner core he symbolises as ‘nature’, and I would assume it is indeed ancient, perhaps archetypal, in fact - by which I only mean to say that this is the part of the psyche which is hard-wired into the physical part of the body-mind. This innate psyche later co-operates with the aspects of the self which are not materially innate, and which only arrive from the great external mental organ we humans have created and call ‘culture’ ; the place where much of our ‘soul’ is stored, to be ‘downloaded’ as each individual grows in childhood. That this co-operation is an uneasy one can be seen by the high value we place on the symbol of nature. I have asked Michael Bennett where he would like to be, or even where, as it were, he is in the recent series of images which he calls ‘Sanctuary’. He immediately points to any one of the lake promontories surrounded by reflection and says “right there”. His consciousness clearly feels at rest and at ease within his symbols of the ancient untrammelled natural psyche. It is a position with which I can readily sympathise, for it offers a position of stability from which one can weather many storms.
Perhaps the clearest indication of the human metaphors in these landscapes is the fact that they all have to be invented. He has no interest in observing or sketching landscape. He is insistent that these images all have to come from the mind. That said, they are clearly all the creations of the world of observation held and then filtered by memory. But the emphasis is on their mental nature, so that they become images reflecting the topography of his mind, the flow of his emotions and thoughts. His insistence that they are enlivened by a sense of transience and loss only heightens, for me their vitality, and I am reminded that John Ruskin, the great critic of nineteenth century art insisted that colour - whether bright or grave, is always “in some degree pensive; the loveliest is melancholy”. Beauty that moves so profoundly must have evoked, for Ruskin, a pressing sense of human transience, and I feel sure that for Michael Bennett this same feeling is always present in his experience of landscape.
Christopher Bucklow
July 2008
http://chrisbucklow.com/
One example of this ‘involving’ is the sense I have that I am the tree in each image of the single tree series. In a sense, psychologically, I leave the studio space and enter the image. I am made to feel this especially keenly when I afterwards look at the ‘Sanctuary’ series, with its deep atmospheric backgrounds and column-like tree trunk in the immediate foreground; for here I am most definitely not the tree, and am surprised to become myself again, returned to standing on the studio floor, once more an observer of the work. This, then, is one example of the kind of involving I have in mind, and yet I am sure there is much more to this phenomenon of the ‘stun’.
Other examples arise out of the formal and surface qualities of the work. The handling of the paint is extremely sensual, and yet the surface is never just surface, for there is always evocative illusion too. Perceptions biased towards one or the other reading - towards surface or window - depend to some extent on my psychological position; but both are equally involving. As the tree - that is when I have become the tree - I feel the envelopment of the differing lights and atmospheres with which the artist enshrouds this personage, and I am thus involved in the magic of the illusion. On the other hand, as myself - as I am when viewing the ‘Sanctuary’ paintings - I become involved in the arrangement of the areas of paint - the composition. Simultaneously, of course this arrangement of depicted forms is the illusory landscape, which I cannot help but enter. But the sheer variety of form and light and colour, and variety of imagined entry into the spaces of the image that Michael Bennett offers is an extremely full experience. This formal level is another level, then, on which I become compellingly involved - a level which again produces the effect of enlarging my experience of the work beyond the confines of my logical, language-producing systems; temporarily stunned as they become as I become seduced by the illusion and the surface that creates it. This brings us close to a unique aspect of the works as a series. For the experience of comparison between the individual paintings produces a heightened awareness of the emotional qualities of each. This is not unlike the experience of music, each note or chord taking its precise feel from its neighbours. In Michael Bennett’s case, of course, we are free to compose our own sequences of feeling as our eyes range across the many images that make up each piece. From my studio, immediately below his, I know that he plays a lot of solo piano CDs as he works, and yet the density of the sensory experience of these paintings puts me in mind of fully orchestrated symphonic music, for there is a largeness of experience which suggests the performance of a full orchestra at its most powerful. I also have to say here that for me it is hard to step back from the individual paintings to view the series as a whole on the wall, and yet when I do I see that the artist has also been actively involved in shaping it as a single entity. But such is the power of the individual units, such is their allure, as surfaces, as illusions, as compositions in themselves and in comparison with the memory traces of their neighbours, I am unwilling to step back and ‘out’ of the flow of the sounding of each individual ‘note’ of the work. And in this the series are also like music, for only in memory can one recreate an entire symphony at a simultaneous moment in time, as an imaginative whole, and as one does so - as with these paintings - one is acutely aware of being ‘outside’ the work. For me at least, I am then immediately drawn ‘step forward’ again, and to re-enter the experience the individual seeing- which then takes on some of the temporal quality of music.
I have been fortunate to see the growth of these works - often on a daily basis - since they began in 2005. I have also been lucky enough to sometimes sit in the studio as they are painted. What strikes one immediately is how great a change in emotional experience a single stroke of the brush has within an image. Admittedly, as the three-inch wide brushes he uses are a significant fraction of the horizontal dimension of each painting, a single stroke covers a wide area, and yet even the slightest dulling or brightening of a hue or tone does produce a wide change in the experience of the image. I should also add that it is hard to be an observer of these changes because they come thick and fast. For Michael Bennett paints very quickly, and there appears to be little consideration of what he is about to do or has just done. Some other instinct than consideration seems to guide the progress of the image. To the outside observer, already in love with what is there on the canvas (even if it is only fleetingly there) the headlong cascade of change seems reckless, even dangerous, risky at every turn, and yet as the pauses in the process attest, even if much that was stunning is lost as it is covered with a new layer of paint, the final product is always a net gain. To the studio observer this process is deeply impressive; for the artist seems to have entered another state. This confirms what I have long suspected about Michael Bennett’s activity; he seems to be addicted to the state of mind I have been describing; it is the activity of painting that he craves - not the finished product (and I have seen him destroy hundreds of large finished paintings, months of work, as if they were the dry residue of a living process that he values much more). In a sense this state of mind is a makers version of the ‘stun’ produced in the onlooker, for it appears (and he himself confirms it in conversation) to involve a broad or even total engagement with the work in progress, one that temporarily switches off the critical and language-producing systems of the mind. There seems to be no remove, no conscious watching of the self engage with the work, but rather an instinctual sureness which suggest that other systems than the conscious guide the progress of the image. Michael Bennett has told me that there is something deathlike about a painting finished, and in this way we might see his addiction to the activity of painting as an addiction to living itself.
Being close to the place where these works are created I have also been privileged to talk to him about his own feelings and thoughts on the work. Despite my awareness of the vital life-addiction he exhibits, and despite my own feelings of life-enhancing involvement in the paintings, both of which, with a little more reflection, might have alerted me to the prospect that only a keen awareness of non-life, of death, of non-being could produce such a powerful embracing of life, I was surprised to learn that he himself feels that the works are melancholy, indeed that they are informed throughout by a sense of loss. Perhaps this is a feeling of impending loss, as an artist approaching his 60th year feels that time now is not ‘unlimited’, but is surely limited and must be well used and savoured. I would also suppose that, mixed in with this, there may also be a sense of the loss of former youth. Certainly a deep awareness of time, or rather the spending of time, seems to be implied in his placing of so much importance on the transient effects of light and atmosphere. Michael Bennett once told me “While it might be nice to be alive on a clear Spring day, it is not something which I identify with, I can’t use it as a metaphor.” We should now turn our attention to the metaphoric aspect of his whole activity.
I am certain that all the things that go into the making of each landscape image, are in fact metaphors of his own life. Not only the individual tree, but also the flux of the atmosphere is metaphoric. In this sense, the landscape is human, is him, the artist, and he will readily admit, in conversation, that the single tree is indeed himself. In this way it is possible to see that the play of light and the movement of cloud or mist around the forms is a metaphor for what it is like to be a feeling consciousness - a soul or psyche - in the flow of a lifetime. I was initially surprised to learn from him that he could never include a human object - be it house or lane in the images. But soon I realised that this pristine nature is in itself a metaphor of human life for him - or more precisely his preferred kind of life. For if the landscape is himself in such important ways, the interest in inviolate landscape is in fact a reflection or metaphor of his individuality, his native self, one unaffected by the modes of human opinion and fashion that surround us in a culture. In this way the individual tree, becomes not only a depiction of what it means to survive through time (though one notes that all the trees are essentially ‘young’ ones, being “fifty to sixty” years old) but also an indication of a determined individuality in the face of the changing atmospheres of fashion and taste in art theory and aesthetics, and indeed the moral positions that they themselves ultimately symbolise. Michael Bennett says of trees, that he sees in them a certain “dignity” and that they have “been around as long or longer than us”; that they “still exist, however much we have done to the world”. My own interpretation of such statements tends towards the psychological, and in order to understand them I would tentatively rephrase them in my own mind to mean that the artist has a relationship to an inner core of his person that is inviolate, that has not been colonised by the culture that pours into us as we enter, as children, the human world of society. This inner core he symbolises as ‘nature’, and I would assume it is indeed ancient, perhaps archetypal, in fact - by which I only mean to say that this is the part of the psyche which is hard-wired into the physical part of the body-mind. This innate psyche later co-operates with the aspects of the self which are not materially innate, and which only arrive from the great external mental organ we humans have created and call ‘culture’ ; the place where much of our ‘soul’ is stored, to be ‘downloaded’ as each individual grows in childhood. That this co-operation is an uneasy one can be seen by the high value we place on the symbol of nature. I have asked Michael Bennett where he would like to be, or even where, as it were, he is in the recent series of images which he calls ‘Sanctuary’. He immediately points to any one of the lake promontories surrounded by reflection and says “right there”. His consciousness clearly feels at rest and at ease within his symbols of the ancient untrammelled natural psyche. It is a position with which I can readily sympathise, for it offers a position of stability from which one can weather many storms.
Perhaps the clearest indication of the human metaphors in these landscapes is the fact that they all have to be invented. He has no interest in observing or sketching landscape. He is insistent that these images all have to come from the mind. That said, they are clearly all the creations of the world of observation held and then filtered by memory. But the emphasis is on their mental nature, so that they become images reflecting the topography of his mind, the flow of his emotions and thoughts. His insistence that they are enlivened by a sense of transience and loss only heightens, for me their vitality, and I am reminded that John Ruskin, the great critic of nineteenth century art insisted that colour - whether bright or grave, is always “in some degree pensive; the loveliest is melancholy”. Beauty that moves so profoundly must have evoked, for Ruskin, a pressing sense of human transience, and I feel sure that for Michael Bennett this same feeling is always present in his experience of landscape.
Christopher Bucklow
July 2008
http://chrisbucklow.com/
