Tribute Album

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I have just made eighteen paintings based on the work of another painter, Karl Benjamin, and let me add, not Benjamin’s real work, but reproductions of his work. It would be one thing if I had seen the work in person but I didn’t. I’ve never seen a Karl Benjamin. I’ve seen reproductions on the Web and in his book Dance the Line. So how can I pay tribute to this work that I’ve never seen?

If you think about it in terms of music it wouldn’t be weird at all. Young musicians who never heard them played live by their authors reinterpret songs all the time. We expect it mostly because music is ephemeral. Like Joni Mitchell said, that’s what makes the performing arts and painting really different. “A painter does a painting, and he paints it, and that's it, you know. He has the joy of creating it, it hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, and maybe somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, 'Paint a Starry Night again, man!' You know? He painted it and that was it.” We understand that music exists in the moment and that the only way to capture it is either through re-interpretation or recording. We understand this about music.

But we think painting is different. We can go to the Museum of Modern Art and see the original Starry Night, IF we’re in New York.  But most of us are not in New York or if we're in New York the work we want to see is in New Zealand.  The way most of us absorb painting is through reproductions because most of us don’t have access to the museums or galleries that house the specific works we’re interested in at any given moment.  So why not validate this experience most of us have with painting, so long as we understand that the reflection becomes a thing of its own?

The eighteen paintings in this project describe my experience of looking at reproductions of the work of Karl Benjamin. Just like we incorporate the pops and crackles on old recordings into our understanding of music we’ve never heard live, I’ve incorporated the flatness, the skewed scale, distorted color into my understanding of Benjamin’s vision. I even began to invent my own images once inspiration took hold.  So thank you Mr. Benjamin -- your work, the reproductions of your work, have moved me to show my appreciation and has inspired me to re-interpret your work in the tradition of music.