collected works Painting

December 1963
Auckland New Zealand.
Ben's journey into a life time of drawing and more recently painting can be traced back to influences from early childhood such as time spent in his fathers'attic office where house plans and drafting paper held sway.Later came odysseys to visit pictures and objects he had only read about in books.The odysseys occur more in his mind and on his canvasses these days and explore travel to the future as well as the past.Music, cappuccinos and phone calls overseas are his biggest vices.

Ben grew up in a house where an industrial steel helix turned off a lathe hung on the dining room wall as an object of contemplation.This early memory inspired him to use flattened corrugated iron in more recent years as a drawing medium.Loving the weathered appearance of objects found in the Australian landscape his art recycles selected materials from the urban environment reworking them into new formations.
Ben lists his inspirations as being drawn from many sources including;drawings from the Baroque and Rococco periods, artist David Hockney, Rosalie Gascoigne for her materials and surfaces, Joseph Cornell for his poetic connections,his father Davids' drawings and cartoonists John Glashan and Ralph Steadman for making both offbeat and humourous pictures which appeal to Bens' own sense of joi de vivre.
Recently he has explored some artistic avenues of photography using expired polaroids as a point of departure from which to delve into different aspects of painting.