Robert Bentley
Born 1950
BFA, Pratt Institute, 1972
Painting has been central to my identity since early childhood. For as long as I can remember I have been compelled to paint, to use the canvas as a place for imagination and remembering.
For fifty-five years I have lived and worked in New York City, creating a professional life that leaves space and time for creative process fueled by experimentation and the ability to leap into the unknown. My process begins simply by making marks on the canvas that I act and react to in real time. It is spontaneous, self reflective, and at times cyclical - the doing informing the process, the process informing the content, and the content informing the doing.
Some years ago I began to make paintings about squiggly white energetic lines on black backgrounds. These energetic lines led me to a deep fascination with physics. My research into how particles interact in space led to more, more white lines and some colored lines, resulting in my family of String Theory paintings.
In 2013 I bought a cabin in the Adirondacks. While nature and trees have always been important in my life and work, my time spent upstate has allowed for long hours walking in the woods. My Tree Portraits are not made outside or even in the Adirondacks, they are painted in my studio in Manhattan and are a reflection of my time communing with and getting to know the forest and the trees around my cabin. They are paintings of how I remember certain paths, certain clearings, and certain trees; they are manifestations of trees to come, the trees I will get to know; they are imagined scenes of how the forest once looked and how it might look one day.
To contact email robert@robertbentleyart.com