“His sculpture is a total environmental thing expressed through tremendous skills with machine processes and forms and total appreciation of the materials such as metal casts with a fantastic sheen, almost a plastic expression and colored plastics, translucent and transparent that pass light along the edges as well as throughout.”
By David Thompson (Special to the Herald),1969
Note for rosie, 8 mok model railway mechanism ref
AB liked models. NP had a small collection of electric trains
AB liked playing with things, he liked games
“ And what about early American modernist Arthur Dove’s painting “Haystack,” hanging directly behind a garishly bright plastic-and-chrome sculpture of a cloud by Anthony Benjamin? Yes, the cloud shape in Benjamin’s “Nimbus V” is eerily similar to the shape of a tree in “Haystack” But who is Anthony Benjamin anyway?
John Baldessari, Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2006
Noted English Sculptor’s Works on Display Here
As well as making etchings in several different locations, he produced a set of of colourful, large screen prints, aptly named the Trans-Atlantic Suite, with printer Kevin Harris. These were shown and marketed by Gorner and Millard, one of the first British galleries to focus on limited edition prints in the 1970s. In the process of returning to the UK in 1973 Benjamin had a one man exhibition of the screanadaen prints as well as etchings and drawings made in Canada and some editioned sculptures.
WHY AB WENT TO CANADA INVITED BY KYOOKA
FIRST SECTION ALBERTA PRAIRIE ETCHINGS AND DRAWINGS
SECOND SECTION SCULPTURE AND EXHIBITION IN NEW YORK
QUOTES
Works by English sculptors - “Barbara Hepworth and Her Contemporaries” - are being shown in two locations in Atlanta, Colony Square…
The Hepworth sculptures and three of her paintings, comprise the major portion of the exhibit, with the remainder including works by Kenneth Armitage, Robert Adams, Anthony Benjamin, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Hubert Dalwood, Gwyther Irwin, Bernard Meadows, Harry Seager, Leslie Thornton and Roland Piche… The exhibit contains work by a number of close contemporaries… and also some leading representatives of a ‘second generation’ of leading sculptors who emerged in more recent years.”
Clyde Burnett, Atlanta Journal 13th October 1971
District V, Sculpture, Anthony Benjamin
How far has Benjamin come in the 1970’s from his humble figurative beginnings, his engineering draftsman training and his time in St. Ives? Clyde Burnett, Atlanta Journal Arts Editor, wrote a helpful review of the above exhibition, placing Benjamin as a '“second wave” sculptor, and described Benjamin’s current work in the exhibition in contemporary terms.
“A strong Constructivist Form is contained in ‘District v’ Neon City Series by Anthony Benjamin.”
Clyde Burnett, Atlanta Journal 13th October 1971
Art as a Technique of Knowing: the work of Anthony Benjamin
“ ‘I was aware,’ Benjamin said, ‘of the impermanence of man and the ultimate permanence of earth.’
The method of drawing… common to all of Benjamin’s work, is essentially the method of ratiocination; drawing as thought… a formal structure evolves under the pencil, a structure which ‘invents’ a semiotic syntax to consider the problem… Artists such as Anthony Benjamin are not of the tribe of fashionable art decorators producing aesthetic goodies for our delectation, but of those engaged in a struggle not merely of their own mental existence, but for the mental existence of all of us.”
Ken Coutts-Smith, artscanada, 1972
Benjamin had “ideas for a different sort of imagined landscape - studies or proposals for monumental Land Art schemes. One was for
‘five 10’ high stainless steel cones placed in an isolated part of the prairie adjacent to a highway… the cones release, each hour upon the hour, three amorphous green clouds and two purple columns of vapour’.
Another was an acrylic prism the size of a drive - in movie screen placed in the prairie and set to follow the sun in such a way that the curved reflective surface would take in the3 entire landscape while casting a prismatic refraction across a 100 square mile area.
Kevin Coutts-Smith 1973, pg 63
Benjamin’s visual vocabulary could come from apparently limitless sources. In 1966 before leaving Britain he produced a series of screenprints inspired by the Art Deco style of fading cinema architecture. Later he drew and made prints based on the neon signs of Toronto’s shops, bars and strip clubs. According to Coutts-Smith, these were both disappearing urban icons and Benjamin, an ‘urban romantic’ sought to secure them as totemic symbols of contemporary sculpture.”
Kevin Coutts-Smith, 1973, pg 62-3
There was perhaps, a play with notions of permanence and impermanence - just as his acrylic sculptures reflected and incorporated the fleeting changes of the world around them, so those neon signs with the dancer’s four legs alternatively illuminated to create the illusion of the Can-Can embodied a tension between material stasis and visual change.
Chris Stevens, Anthony Benjamin 1932-2002, pg. 24
Alt text for image and audio
“One sheet of drawings includes:
Long heating elements (500’ 0`|” laid up at the peak of the Rockies in summer and switched on after the snow has fallen, making deep lines in the top of the mountain and big nice forms at the end of the elements.
A series of red neon magic cirlcles 40’ 0”dia. set in the snow of the Rocky mountains between Calgary and Vancouver under the Air Canada route would glow from under the snow.
Anthony Benjamin inscriptions on a drawing, Calgary 1968
Angus Stewart wrote the introduction to the RHoK Gallery Exhibition, Belgium, 1994
“Anthony Benjamin thwarted by his wish to go to art school, was apprenticed as an engineer. So his hands were taught to move with precision. His brain learnt to conceptualise. He began to manoeuvre ideas and images; and so he engineered his entry into the world of art. Sent to start a fourth year, instructed to sign on again for engineering science and mathematics , he substituted life drawing, perspective and composition. Not for the last time, Benjamin went his own way. Shortly thereafter he entered art school.…. It is Benjamin’s habit to use a simple fluid line, or a coruscating mix of sharp colour, or a clash of textures to make a point. The point may be simple, or complex. These drawings, so simply conceived and explained - they are only pencil on paper - are deceptive. Here he has packed in so much thought and detail that the onlooker has to pause, examine and reflect. These are not images for those in a hurry. This man is in agreement with Poussin who wrote “ Things which partake of perfection should not be looked at in haste, but call for time, judgement and intelligence. The means employed in their appraisal must be the same as those used in their making.”…
He is an artist whose pencil can snake and curl a line as wondrously as Tiepolo, as fluid as Matisse…His tools are simple. His material mundane. It is not what he uses, but how he uses it. His output depends on his hand and eye, not on mechanical aids. But his hand is directed with a merciless discipline, over long periods of time, so while some works are discarded because they fail to measure against his criteria, others are destroyed by his working and reworking, which can be so fierce the paper is exhausted.
The paper comes from Italy, from Fabriano. It is sharp white, with a tough surface that accepts incised lines and tolerates the laying and removing of graphite. The pencils are English, made by Berol, and have a quality of lead that Benjamin finds sympathetic with his way of working. He also uses pencil crayons and massages some areas of the paper with graphite crayon. To expand his range of chiaroscoro he ‘paints’ graphite dust onto the surface. Within the ranges of black, white and grey, he searches for the nuance that adds one more spec of variety to a drawing which as a whole consists of numberless such minute records. The intensity of his inward vision forces him to invent and borrow ways of reaching his target. He describes this tonal variation as turning up or down the light, his slight and intricate pencil movements as adding sparse activity to force the onlooker to roam within the picture. Benjamin wants the eyes of his audience to move about, to see the differences, to react to the wit, the jokes and the ironic souvenirs. As he draws Benjamin enters into a dialogue with each mark, so the final picture is consequent on those discussions.
… It could be said that he is an artist’s artist. That is so. It is also true that he is a thinker’s artist. He offers strange and fascinating pictures which can captivate the viewer and evoke the pleasure that grows out of the pain of twentieth century confusion.”
NEW TEXT AND PHOTOS….
In 1993 Benjamin was part of two exhibitions- New Norfolk Drawings, with Derrick Greaves and Roger Ackling, the first at the King’s Lynn Art Centre, and the second at the Norwich Castle Museum. The eloquent Elspeth Barker visited him at the Lowes Farm Studio and wrote for the King’s Lynn catalogue - “ At present he is working mostly in tones of grey, but colour is reappearing. His studio is impersonal, a cool efficient working area. The light comes from glazed sections of the roof; his door is closed and he has no windows; cannot see out. This is deliberate. He sees his work as on ongoing process, delving through genes and memory into his own expended life. His verbal reticence is transmuted into images, abstract or figurative. “Art is always autobiographical” he says “but also hidden, indirect”…
MOVE THE 3RD B&W PHOTO ( Debbie Besford ) ON THE LEFT OF THE COLLAGE ABOVE, HIM SITTING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF A TABLE COVERED WITH DRAWING MATERIALS ( it was used in the K .L .Cat.) …DOWN TO HERE…
The text for the Norwich Castle Museum exhibition catalogue was written by the Museum Director, Andrew Moore. He mentions: “The project was conceived at Anthony Benjamin’s home in Kelling Village, north Norfolk over a dinner party with the three artists…” This was not the first, or last, time Benjamin was involved in a “project conceived…over a dinner party” He enjoyed giving convivial dinner parties, as well as starting up complex ‘Projects’. Moore go on to mention: “His studio is not far from Cley-next-the-Sea where some of the memorial stone carvings in the churchyrad there provided the starting point for several drawings…In one the image of an iris is superimposed upon an aquatint plate which has the appearance of marbling. The pair shows a guinea fowl: before printing a guinea fowl feather has been placed against the plate… Like Ackling Benjamin, explores chiaroscuro.”
PLACE THE PHOTO OF THE N.C.M. CATALOGUE HERE….
Tony Warren, who knew his work well, wrote in the Arts Review - “ Anthony Benjamin is breathtaking in the control of the humble pencil. On huge sheets of paper he conjures up tunnels of of vision which intersect at at unexpected points in space. He insists on a flexibility of vision, forcing us to to read his objects as being in deep space despite contradictory evidence. Both abstract and geometrical elements are present, and accorded the same ‘reality’ as common objects such as vases, shells, and flowers. Indeed, the latter can be more ephemeral, their transparency insisted upon until their presence is merely iconic. Even when perspective is canceled or denied by vigorous use of the rubber, Benjamin still keeps dragging us unwillingly back to the renaissance view of the world.”
A large ‘Painting in Pencil’ work was acquired by the Castle Museum for the Permanent Collection.
MOVE THE GIMPEL CATALOGUE DOWN HERE TO KEEP IT CHRONOLOGICAL…