Amy Bennett

For her latest narrative paintings, Amy Bennett imagined families living in a fictional small town: their pasts, their interactions, and dramas. To help her imagine scenarios in their lives, Amy Bennett constructed a 1:87 scale model of their neighborhood, using model railroad miniatures, landscape supplies, and dollhouse lighting. I asked Amy Bennett about her paintings and her reading.
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For a look at Amy Bennett’s paintings, see www.amybennett.com.

READER'S VOICE: I was wondering if you'd ever done any writing. Your exhibition Stories, at the Linda Warren Gallery in Chicago, created a setting with anxious characters in a country farmhouse; and your current exhibition Neighbors, at the Richard Heller Gallery, kind of reminds me of some movies, like To Kill a Mockingbird, with sinister events unfolding in darkness in a small town.

AMY BENNETT: I enjoyed taking some fiction writing classes as an undergrad, but the only writing I do these days is to flesh out painting ideas. An image or character or scene might start to develop in my mind, and writing helps to make it something more concrete. It also helps me remember!

RV: Do your favorite books tend to deal with themes like your paintings, such as family life, small town America, loneliness, anxiety or obsession?

AB: Yes, I hate to be so predictable but they definitely do. I love JD Salinger, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates, so relationships are another common theme. I also like books that use language in the same way a beautiful painting uses light. Words or light can describe a very ordinary object or scene in a way that makes you see it very clearly as if for the first time.

RV: Do you get ideas for paintings from your reading, or movies, or stories you've heard, or do ideas just come from thinking about the scale models you build of houses and towns?

AB: All of the above. I get a lot of ideas from reading. It's not that I'll read a description of a place or situation and then feel compelled to illustrate it, although that has happened before, but usually I'll be reading and then find that my mind has wandered off and I suddenly have a wonderful idea that I have to write down. But I usually have to turn back several pages, which makes for very slow reading. The same is true with movies, but books are better triggers for daydreams because your mind is already involved in inventing images. I get a lot of ideas from playing with my model.
In making the model neighborhood I had to consider who lived in each house, what their relationships and habits were, and how they related to their neighbors. Plus, I might have an idea for a specific image, but I have to experiment with my model first to see what actually looks the most interesting. I am often surprised, because through arranging the model, I usually discover something better than my original idea. And there are some times that I can't get my idea to come to life in the model, so I have to shelf the idea and develop a different image.

RV: Do memories come into your paintings much, like childhood images that have stuck in your head for decades? Or do family events or relatives inspire some pictures?

AB: There are moments and people that will stay with me for my entire life. They are certainly inspiring, and I am often working with closely related material, but I am not interested in recreating images of the past. A couple of the houses in my neighborhood are loosely based on the homes of my grandparents in two different stages of their lives. It gives me a framework to filter through some of the things I experienced with them and saw them go through as they aged.
It also provides a stage for my imaginings of what their lives were like when they were young and raising a family. By translating my own experiences through the model, it becomes something different and new. It's no longer a personal, internal thing, but a toy onto which I'm trying to impose some aesthetics. The model helps keep me from getting too embarrassed or bored.

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READER'S VOICE: Could you recommend about four or five books you've really liked and maybe say why you liked them?

AMY BENNETT: I enjoyed Justin Spring's biography, Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art. He was not only a painter, but an intellectual, an art critic, and a teacher. Plus, he grew up in a strange family and then created an even stranger one of his own. I usually have a strong preference for fiction, but Spring writes with a narrative sensibility that recreates a world populated by the likes of painters Willem DeKooning and Larry Rivers, and poets James Schuyler and John Ashberry.
Another non-fiction book I'd recommend is Vermeer in Bosnia by Lawrence Weschler. Weschler finds connections between seemingly disparate things.
Shortcuts, by Raymond Carver, is a favorite and has been an influence, of course.
I read Alice Munro's collection of stories, Runaway, most recently, but you probably can't go wrong with any of her work.
My last recommendation is one my husband recommended to me: Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library. It is funny and heartbreaking and beautiful.

RV: Do you think the pendulum is starting to swing back to realistic paintings now, after the many years of seeming critical and academic preference for abstract art?

AB: The art world is big enough at the moment to embrace both representational and abstract art, isn't it? I think the resurgence of figurative and representational painting is making anyone who proclaimed the death of painting at the final reduction of abstraction look a bit silly and deficient of imagination. Painters are proving every day that there isn't a finite path for abstraction or representation. But yes, representational painting is finally seeing a resurgence in appreciation.

RV: In 2002 you received an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. I was wondering what new things you learned at this institution, and what you remember about your time there.

AB: The New York Academy of Art focuses on the human figure to develop skills for the creation of representational artwork. The curriculum is intensively focused on anatomy, perspective, and traditional drawing and painting techniques. When I first went there, I needed to have something in front of me in order to draw it, but by the time I left, I was able to paint the figure from my imagination or memory. That has freed me up to do whatever I want.

RV: What's your daily routine in Brooklyn?

AB: I try to get to my studio in DUMBO by around 9/9:30. Luckily, I get to walk there, which is a wonderful way to start the day. I break for lunch, which I eat in my studio. If the weather's nice, I usually take another break in the late afternoon to go for a walk along the waterfront between the bridges or through Cadman Plaza Park. I try to make it coincide with when the sun is beginning to set. I usually head home around 6/6:30. I prepare dinner for my husband and myself and then read or email or watch a movie in the evening while my husband works on his comics.

RV: Do you spend all your creative time painting new works, or do you spend time on other projects, like drawing, or sketching around New York?

AB: I'm very focused. I love painting so much more than working with any other medium. Whenever I start drawing, I always wish I was using a brush instead of a pencil. I guess I just think more in terms of shapes of light rather than line. I was a printmaking major in undergrad, though, and I hope to get back into a shop soon to try my hand at it again.

RV: What comments about your work did you get from people at the current Neighbors exhibition at the Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles?

AB: I had a couple of memorable comments. One woman told me that the work looked "soulless" and another woman said the work "looked like it had been done by a man," but that I should "take it as a compliment, because whenever something is done with competence, you assume it was done by a man."
I've tried to forget those words (obviously without much success) and instead focus on all of the positive and generous things people had to say. People seemed to respond favorably to the mood and lighting and detail.
I enjoyed seeing people get up close to the work and try to figure out what was going on. I also received a lot of comments on the surface of the paintings, which is flat and somewhat glossy, and seems to remind people of a photo's surface.

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READER'S VOICE: I read that you were married to comics artist Jonathan Bennett, and I was wondering how you met. Does your work or working methods influence his or vice versa?

AMY BENNETT: Jon and I met at art school. We were both printmaking majors who worked in the shop all of the time so we got to know each other really well. It's wonderful having an artist for a husband because we can share enthusiastically and offer each other criticism. It's helpful that the comics and art worlds are pretty distinct from one another.
There's no doubt that comics have influenced my thinking. I recently started developing sequential images. A couple of years ago, I was making paintings that looked down into apartments without perspective. Jon showed me lots of cartoonists who had explored similar concepts: Frank King, Richard McGuire, Chris Ware, etc. It's an exciting medium that has a lot of common concerns with narrative painting.

RV: How did you get the idea to make the scale models of the houses and towns on which many of your paintings have been based, and how did you learn the skills to create these?

AB: I have always enjoyed painting from life, so up through graduate school, I always painted from a still life or a model (a person posing for me) or the landscape. I used to like painting old toys because they seemed like characters you could project a lot onto. When I had the idea of looking down into apartments to relate the dramas of residences in close proximity, it was natural to use dollhouse furniture. I created foam core walls to construct invented floor plans. I decorated the rooms and lit them as the narratives dictated. The still life became an environment that I could incorporate figures into. I made a different model for each painting. My next project was to build a dollhouse-scale house made of wood that I could use for several paintings. My sister, Laura Kinney, generously loaned her expertise during a weekend-long crash course in woodworking in my living room. We had quarter-inch plywood and a dremel. It was bare bones, but it got the job done. I decided to zoom out from 1/12 scale to 1/87 scale for my model neighborhood. I bought a book on model railroading and figured it out. My parents are both very crafty people, so I must have a bit of that in me. Model making is super fun. It's scary how quickly time goes by when I'm working on a project.

RV: How will you go about preparing the Galleri Magnus Karlsson solo exhibition in Sweden in September? What things do you have to do between now and then, and how do you organise transportation of the paintings and other logistical matters?

AB: I think the show will be mostly winter scenes made from the neighborhood. Since I grew up in Maine, a snowy landscape triggers lots of ideas. I've been dying to winterize my model, but there's no going back, so I needed to do all of my non-snow images first. I'll need to replace all of the leafy trees with bare-branched ones, replace the lawns with snow, and model snowbanks and ice puddles. Then I'll get to start the paintings. I'm not sure how the paintings will be shipped to Stockholm. I've shipped individual paintings there via FedEx, and I've shipped shows within the US using art shippers. I imagine I'll have to build a crate and leave plenty of time. I'm sure the gallery will offer some guidance in that department.

RV: What are some of your long-term plans?

AB: I have an idea for another model that I'm really excited about. I think I'll begin making it after my show this September. It's good to let an idea mull for a while.

-copyright Simon Sandall.