Falling into Winter

For many weeks, it was a glorious fall in Greater Boston. Knowing this time was fleeting, I tried to capture it in this painting. The leaves were changing color and falling, the number of Covid cases was falling, and the Trump administration was falling. Hope was in the air.       We continued our…

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Hope Stayed in the Box

My paintings are my diary. And my diary is part therapy, part meditation, part practice in gratitude. Far less Pollyanna and far more survivalist, this brand of gratitude is simply the art of drawing attention to something lovely—an especially useful practice when immersed in an experience that is anything but. The pandemic experience lends itself…

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PretentiousOKY

Pretentious OKY is a project that was born at the beginning of 2020. Since I started it, I have taken it as a form of escape from the reality with which we coexist. I find everyday scenes that I want to appropriate, and my way of doing it is through the lens. I then transform…

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Life on the Inside

I am a published poet and novelist. I began working in collage as a way to further indulge my fascination with story. Collage is a kind of visual poetry. It seeks coherence amidst disorder, elegance amidst anarchy. It traverses a subterranean landscape, where who we are and what we experience is reflected back at us…

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Peace in the Unknown

During the earliest weeks of the pandemic, around the time Governor Baker announced a state of emergency in Massachusetts, I was not thinking too much about my artwork. I had just finished a couple of commissions, and it was an especially busy time at work, where healthcare clients had so many new questions they needed…

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Slow

One of the things that defines who I am is driving. Driving is my meditation. Driving is totally alien from an evolutionary standpoint, and I revel in its foreignness. Springtime, back country road, top down, radio off.  That is my bliss. For an ADHD brain like mine, having a totally different point of view every…

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OK, Stand Six Feet From Your Camera…

I’m a nature photographer and I teach—the two are deeply intermingled in my life. When I travel through the country to take photographs for my series of “back roads” books, I create workshops along the way for my favorite students. They meet up with me for four to seven days at a pre-selected site. I…

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A Sense of Belonging

In March 2020, the pandemic led to a lockdown in the UK, as it did in many countries. Our worlds shrank. Yet, despite the worries, for me there was a silver lining—I became intimately connected with the landscape around the small village where I live in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Every day I would walk along the…

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No Audience

A small theater selected a work of mine for the drama Tor und Tod by Hugo v. Hofmannsthal. A large-format stage design was created as a background. During theater rehearsals at TheaterLabor TraumGesicht Düsseldorf, inspired by the scenes, more works developed. Then came the performance ban due to the coronavirus pandemic. The stage room stayed…

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A Pandemic for All Seasons

Spring 2020—we thought the “new normal” would surely be temporary. Then it extended to summer 2020.  And fall 2020. And winter 2020. I’m hoping to show a very different collage at the end of 2021.     Copyright © 2021 Steve Bennett Steve BennettSteve Bennett is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based visual artist. He began taking photographs…

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