Christopher Benson, Santa Fe, New Mexico. "Maybe, Maybe Not". Oil on panel, 2018. Chistopher Benson:I was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1960, and grew up in nearby Newport. From 1975 to 1979 I attended the Woodstock Country School in South Woodstock, Vermont. WCS was an alternative, arts-friendly boarding school, founded in the 1940s by a former student and teacher from the famous Black Mountain School. This background gave the place a strong affinity for the arts and humanities. Sadly, it closed forever in 1981. At WCS, I took a rigorous two-year studio course in oil painting and art history with Peter Devine, a realist painter who had recently transitioned from abstraction, but yet retained a strong modernist sensibility. After graduating, I enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design, where I continued to focus on painting. Unhappy in an increasingly conceptual painting department, I withdrew from the program at the end of my junior year and moved to New York City. I studied independently there until 1985 when I returned to Rhode Island. In 1988, I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico where I had some of the first commercial gallery exhibitions of my oil paintings. While living in New Mexico I took a trip to California, were I met Cybele Leverett, the daughter of a family friend. She was just leaving for the east to attend college, and eventually I followed her there to live again in Newport while she attended Brown University in Providence. When she graduated in 1993, we moved together to her hometown of Berkeley, in California. We were married there in '94 and had our first son, William, in '97. We lived in Berkeley for seven years then moved back to Rhode Island in 2000. Our second son, Fisher was born there in 2001. I exhibited in Silicon Valley and San Francisco from 1997 until 2004, when Cybele and I both re-enrolled at college in Rhode Island, she to get a Master's degree, again at Brown, and I to complete my previously abandoned BFA at RISD. After completing our degrees, we moved back to Santa Fe in 2006. We have lived in New Mexico now for 14 years.I have exhibited in galleries in the southwest and on both coasts for over 30 years. I am a two-time recipient of the Pollock-Krasner painting fellowship grant, and have work in private and museum collections throughout the United States.

26.5 x 27 x 2 in