T A N T R A B E N S K O
I think I dreamed of art while I floated waiting to be born. My dreams matured with me, becoming a major focus and passion. Later, my art became part of musical performances. I sold commission portraits. I minored in art history in university and majored in writing, acquiring an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa writer's workshop. Eventually, I co-owned an art gallery in Montevallo, Alabama, while taking printmaking classes at the local college. The Four Winds Gallery became known as a synergistic place where performance artists, alternative musicians, artists, and poets could inspire audiences and each other. My own art was showcased there, and in many galleries in the south. I was winning best of show awards and making sales when I moved and changed my focus.
Between then and now I edited and published The Mendicant, a nationally distributed magazine devoted to spiritual empowerment, which featured my art. At the same time I wrote numerous esoteric small books, which included my art.
For most of the last two and a half years I have been creating art alchemically, through a combination of camera, computer, and deep meditation. I've traversed the country several times in search of unique source imagery.
Several of my giclée images can be seen on the cover and in the latest issue of the University of Alabama at Birmingham's magazine Aura, on the cover of Springhill Review, as well as in ArtZine and Branches Quarterly.It is also slated for use on the cover of the latest poetry book by Diana Olegre. My art adorns the most recent cd by prolific Colorado musician Saphyre entitled Farasha Fantasy. Elsewhere in Colorado, you can find a seven foot canvas print of mine in Tonic, Boulder's only oxygen bar, where I'm also the house artist. Most recently, two of my prints have been accepted for a peace-oriented art show in January, 2002 at The Voyeur in downtown Olympia and for a later show there as well. Also, locally, my art shows in Sylvan Wisdom. In April, several pieces of my art will be shown in Atlanta at Eyedrum and Birmingham.
My art can also be viewed on my own website Tantragarden , as well as other galleries such as Gallery Now, Focus, Creanum Belgium. My portfolio is in several places of renown including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, British Journal of Photography, and Zone Zero. Some of my giclees are printed by Steve Bicknell in London in special editions.
Artists Statement I had a dream once that starred an art teacher animatedly admonishing us to create our works with intense passion, putting all that matters into our hands, our movements, our visionary concepts, our emotions, our images. Looking at a piece of our art should change people, he said with verve, and it should muscularly move them to a place within consciousness that engages them fully. As a poetically inspired artist, I like to take people to experiences within themselves which have no linear words that could paraphrase it. I want to take them to a subtle state they have not felt before, but which calls up something essential and exciting and magical inside. I express my reverence for life by allowing its uncertain mysteries to remain unlabeled, surreal, many layered, enigmatic, too full to be expressed in one simple easily explainable, or predictable image.
Many surfaces of perspective are opaque, many transparent, and they intertwine throughout life and dream, blurring together. I am interested in the scratched and blurred beauty of surfaces of attention wafted over images. It is truer to me to look at perspective this way than just at an image presented as simply real. We can take refuge in the textural surfaces floating between us and the original image; they remind us that the artistic vision we have can rescue us from the mundane world if we maintain focus
on it, instead of the mundane illusion.Presenting complex art with many levels and collaged elements, images within other images, doors within boxes, is also an attempt at portraying reality clearly, through the truth of mystery. My art is often framed within the picture, the framing once again distancing the viewer from the sense of the image as fact. The colors, and subject matter, are intense or subtle, but rarely reminiscent of the tyranny of the eye's version. Outside edges can be rough, calling attention to themselves, not hoping to be accepted as conventional windows to be looked through without thinking. Tantra Bensko
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