Allen Bentley

Our featured artist this quarter is Allen Bentley.
exert from an interview with Chris Wanamaker, arts writer, Philadelphia, PA

CW: Why do you paint dancing figures?

AB: It kind of evolved that I do the dancing figure because I've always been interested in the narrative, about telling small stories. For a long time it was about telling huge, epic stories that were too big to handle. I would end up losing the painting trying to tell my story…huge, elaborate, you know mythic, big kinda stories. It was too much to handle.
I've also always painted self-portraits, my wife and I and stories of relationships. I got married around my senior year in college, and so while I've been developing as a painter, I've been dealing with the idea of relationships and so that's a very important term in my painting; the relationship between people. Then I started to think about how a relationship is not just this happy thing all the time but more of a struggle. There's a give and a take. Good times, bad times, compromises and its all this crazy balancing act, swirling thing. That naturally led to dancing. That is a great way to talk about relationship between people that's a give and a take. So it became a perfect metaphor.

CW: That's very interesting because I wouldn't think that's the first thing you would say.

AB: It's critical to what I do. Things serve functions. My paintings can stand alone. They're made to stand-alone but they also serve purposes for me. They're about talking about something and most of the time it's about the relationship but there are small stories being told. The stories have gotten smaller. I've taken away all the props and the stuff. Some of the older paintings were full scenes that would take place, someplace in a kitchen, in a living room. It was about telling a small story. Here it has gotten smaller to where the stories are in a glance or in a gesture or in the way a hip swings.

CW: Can you elaborate on the mythic?

AB: That was a big part of my upbringing as a painter studying under Robert Godfry. His work is about making a new mythology in a way. To create the myths in our own culture. To keep recreating those or making new ones. I started hearing things like that at a very early stage in the paintings and they're still there. There aren't three figures in the world there are two. Just these two, in any one painting. In any one world there are these really archetypal people and it's their relationship that is important. So that's where the mythic has gone in these paintings but for a while it was about extraordinary things happening in normal circumstances and seeing what would come of it. I haven't been doing those for a while cause I couldn't pull them off, but the idea of a larger story is still important.

CW: How else has your work developed?

AB: Well there's one other part to it; on a formal level, which I don't tend to talk about. I tend to talk about content. My work has always been based heavily on gesture. Very gestural figures and I've always struggled…not struggled, but I've always been goal oriented towards form and it doesn't always come. I have this very erratic mark when I draw. [It's] all over the place. When I paint it tends to be fairly erratic. It comes and goes…its like it's attached to a drill or something. It's been this struggle to make my erratic mark lock onto form. Not to do away with [that struggle] because it's very important to how I think. The idea of I'm going to hit six hundred times and one of those will be right [verses] the idea of can I hit it fifty times and one of them be right?

CW: How do you know when it's right?

AB: It depends, a lot of these paintings are very layered. I try in each layer to hit the mark, to hit what I want. Then it dries and I take another stab at it. That's one possibility. Another is I'll have a dry layer [and] I restructure. I put my trying to get the mark right on top of that and if its not right I may take it off and try again. So the paintings look a lot more spontaneous than what they are.

CW: Your colors seem very feminine, but the paint application 'stereotypically' seems more masculine.

AB: Feminine colors, huh? 'Stereotypically'?

CW: 'Stereotypically,' yes. Color [could still be] seen as very feminine. How did your color work evolve?

AB: I had a pretty good training with color. I started with an Old Master's Palette of all browns, an earth tone palette. I slowly added color to that [and] took away my earth tones. For awhile it became a very neon palette, very fluorescent and that sticks around. I use a lot of pinks and yellows and oranges and very bright colors for what I'm doing because…I want them to dance! I want them to 'pop' and to do that I need some spunk…. I try to use color to help me model light and form on the figures.

CW: To me, it seems your work is very contradictory. Is this a conscious decision? Do you think you are trying to reconcile contradictions in your work?

AB: There are almost two paintings going on that have to be united, somehow. There's the painting of the figures and …the space around [them]. There are two there, one is an abstraction and the other is, has figures. You asked me, "why not paint abstractions?" well I do and then I cover them with figures! That's what they're good for [laughing]. That gets me in lots of trouble with lots of people I know. 'That's what abstractions are good for!' That'd be a great quote to see someplace [more laughing]. So there are two different paintings in each one and then it's how they get integrated. It's where the color shifts starts to happen. I don't want it to be totally different worlds [or] color use. They have to have something to do with each other.

CW: Do you see the background in terms of the figure?

AB: Yes, they are planned for the most part, but there is something spontaneously that
happens when I'm just moving paint around. Because before the figures are brought in my
Paint doesn't have to build form. It doesn't have to build space, really. I'll build space when the figures are brought in. There is something kind of random that will happen when they're put on there, things that I can't always predict and I like that. Or I'll just build the ground in such a way that's gonna thoroughly complicate my life when I start the painting to make me fix it and that's a good thing. Catch myself off guard and so I'll purposelymake the background unusable. Not 'background', I hate calling it that. [I'll make] the field unusable. Things that are wrong that I've got to go to once the figures come into it.

CW: Create a challenge for yourself.

AB: Yes.

CW: What goes on [with] the physical action of the painting? How do you balance that in terms of letting it be intuitive [as well as] analytical?

AB: A lot of my color is intuitive, it comes out while I'm going. I don't always know where it comes from but I'm just glad it comes [laughs]. Which is fine! Then I reference back to the other paintings I've done; 'well I could use that color here and I think I could do it better by using it like this'. As far as things go, I work fairly fast. I do a lot of general blocking, blocking things in and then very quickly get back to building. I build the whole thing at the same time, all the points of the figures and how they thay relate to the space at the same time. And I'm dancincing while I do it. I'm jumping around. I'm taking them off the wall and I'm on the floor so I can get a better …reach [at] the top. I'm jumping back and I'm coming at it again. Once I call a painting done I rarely ever go back and touch it because I believe that there was something that was recorded in my actions that I have to appreciate, that I have to respect. The idea of that painting can be a record of your movements and how important that is. So, sometimes things happen; it's strange or it's quirky or it works somehow and I let it stand…I have a good sense of what's right and wrong in the paintings.

CW: What are your earliest associations with dancing?

AB: Oh, I'm a lousy dancer, Chris. I stink at it.

CW: That's interesting. Ever try to play music as well?

AB: Yeah, terrible! I have a fair sense of rhythm but it doesn't go anywhere.

CW: But you would never know that from the self-portraits of you [dancing with your wife].

AB: I have a good idea. I know what it needs to feel like. I understand about what the body feels like when it's doing something. I'll come back to that…
I can paint a mean a pretty mean dance but it's pretty darn awful when I'm doing it. Dancing is very much, in the paintings, about the story and about the body in motion. I've always painted things in flux. It's the idea that something can be here and here and
here [gesturing] and still get that sense of it moving in the painting. It's slightly shifting. It's slightly out of sync or in two places at once.
…Well back to the thing about the sense of the body in motion. I have a really good spatial sense. I've always been able to take an image in my mind and rotate it around and see all different sides of it and keep track of where things are. I only see from one side, yet I understand how the backside works… and part of that is just understanding…what the body feels like when it does something.
When I teach figure drawing I have the students mimic the pose of the model. And do that for a long time and often, until they start to not just draw weight on a hip, but feel it with their own hip…and how that transfers into drawing. That's what these paintings are about.
I end up dancing a lot of the similar things while I'm painting these people because I need to feel it. Not just see it. To see it is half the information but to feel it is what's important. So, in a way, every single one of these people is me, Because I have to feel what that would be like.

2002

Please contact the gallery for information on exhibition catalogue,
"Lead & Follow."