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Date: 8/8/2023
LEVERETT — Robert Bent, abstract painter from Greenfield, paused last week while hanging canvases for his show at Leverett Crafts & Arts.
“I am telling a story, in a sense, all of my work is autobiographical,” Bent said of his paintings. “This is me making choices along the way in structuring the painting … and what I put between the lines and what colors I put between them, that’s my autobiography, my self portrait.”
The retired immigration attorney is a colorful man. The canvases on display in the Barnes Gallery feature bright pigments, contrasting shapes, plenty of open areas. Many feature a botanical motif, while others use purely abstract shapes to create an impression of organization and balance. The effect is that of entities on deep fields of saturated color.
The suggestion? The world has a reassuring logic and coherence.
The coherence of Bent’s paintings, and the surprising depths, make them emotionally attractive. Part of the challenge for him, though, is to put on less paint. He leaves deceptively simple spaces between the shapes. He creates action and energy on the flat surface by using different shades of one color, such as blue, and by varying the density of the shades.
Bent, who began painting in the mid-90s, left his law career, rented a studio and began to “make pictures” full-time in 2005. The show at the LCA is called “Process,” but Bent, unschooled in visual arts in the traditional sense, finds it difficult to talk about his process. A recent trend in the art world, casualism, offers a philosophical handle.
The term casualism, according to Wikipedia, was coined in 2011 to describe a trend among painters who leave raw edges and unfinished areas in a painting. Much like reader response theory, the idea that readers co-create a story as they read it, casualism promotes the idea in painting that each viewer co-creates a painting as they encounter it. The idea strikes Bent as apt.
Then again, emotions drive the artist to paint, to create meaning and understanding of the world. The process brings Bent to a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. The paintings, hopefully, offer a similar sense of satisfaction, of desires met and longings satisfied, for those who see them.
“Everybody has a place of longing in themselves,” Bent said, a place of unhappiness and unsatisfied desires. “I’d like to see the world as a happier place. I don’t have any control over that, but I can make happy things to look at. That probably sounds crazy, but most artists are.”
The abstract images Bent paints are appealing precisely because they present an antidote to chaos and craziness: beauty and a process of coming to self knowledge. Bent often begins a painting by presenting himself with a visual problem. Pushed by the challenge, he doesn’t stop dabbing with the acrylics until he expressed all that he hoped to.
“When I’m painting I’m thinking about solving a problem, solving a riddle, working with color, trying to see some life appear on a blank space…that’s terrifying, but also seductive,” Bent said. “I’d like to think I’m reaching as far into myself as I can, to get to places I’ve never been before.”
Bent’s images are intriguing, in part, because they make no effort to conjure any specific physical place. Rather, his paintings hang like slices of life, rectangular icons that help Bent, and a viewer, better understand the whole. The whole, for Bent, is about the process of discovering himself through the work, the process of spreading paint on prepared canvas that reveals the reassuring beauty of the world as a whole.
A painter friend once told Bent never to use the word inspiration. His show at the LCA, “Process”, suggests he took the recommendation to heart.
“Get in there and do it, mess around with the paint and make the shapes and color combinations you want to make,” Bent said. “Let that be your inspiration.”
“Process,” the show featuring abstract paintings by Robert Mace Bent, will be on display at Leverett Crafts & Arts until Aug. 27, with a reception that day from 3-5 p.m. Viewing hours are Saturday and Sunday from 1-5 p.m.