Hi, Carol,
I just read a great Tom Waits interview someone sent me, and, inspired, thought maybe I should just start with self chosen topics, like he did, see if you can use anything I write that way. Who knows what that will be....
Dreams: I dream about art constantly. Even when I was taking a break from art, I was still an artist in my dreams, and I thought if I started back, I could merge with that dream self and it would be like I had been making art every night of my life. I'd have a lot to draw on.
Lately, in my dreams, pictures have been portals. I can go through them. I like to think of my art that way. They are like dream portals. But I don't want to make them too easy, too obvious, too much fantasy or predictably dreamlike in the mainstream way. I want to make each one unique, an new idea. Something challenging. And enigmatic. I like to create moods that have no name. Create scenes that can't be defined. Like poetry--it should never be paraphrased. If it can be, I don't like it.
Poetry: The wind making the dust into invisibility to cover your nakedness around a fire in the desert. I have always lived intensely, exotically, and for me that is part of my poetry. Poetry is what I studied seriously, what I did with my ex-husband, the poet, for several years. It was what I studied at the famous university of Iowa. I wrote and was publised often, but missed the visual element, grew weary of the look of words on the page. I fell backwards into the waters of art, which I had always swum in. I swam poetry. In the dark, under the moonlight, and words were not enough. In my dreams, there are not just words. I had to create more visions, and what matters to me is not that people get an idea I am trying to get across, but that they find ecstacy in it, through whatever ideas they find in it. Just as in poetry. It isn't based on an idea. It has to arise out of the creation of it. It has to be born from the process.
I like my art to engage a person intellectually as often as it can, like poetry. I can find the charm in a simple picture of flowers, which are a wonderful creation, but for myself, I need something more involved, more mysteriously compelling. I delight in sometimes finding something linear and non linear at the same time in my art. Too much linearity seems to stick things together too much for me. I like things to have a kind of space around them that frees them up, that lets them be reshuffled, rearranged. I like to play with layers of photos, with frames within frames, with images juxtaposed that create a new symbol of something that can be seen in many ways. I like the layers, erased softly, distressing each other, dreaming each other, vibrating with each other, to create a feeling that draws something out of the viewer into not exactly consciousness, but more like lucid dreaming. I make sure that when I title the art, it doesn't tie it down to an explanation, but makes it into poetic interpretation up to each viewer to see deeply.

ok, Carol, I don't know if these topics work for you, but at least you get an idea of who I am. Hope this makes it easier for you instead of harder! Have fun,
Tantra

This is wonderful Tantra - Tell us more! -
I love the way you are/think/do/appreciate/emote/care etc etc

I'm so glad you liked what I wrote. I'll have fun doing more. I'm taking a break from cold wet and windy by visiting Alabama, but normally, that describes where I live, in Washington State. It's been snowy there all week. Usually, it just rains every single day. Except for the days when it storms.
More interview. I'll surprise myself again with topics...
Love:
I use pictures of people I have strong feelings of love for, and there is an intensity to it therefore, a kind of worship almost, a delving into their unique configurations of secret symbols, their haunting ways of affecting me, the way their images compell me to look at them again and again, combining them with meanings almost like dreaming about them. We all are affected by pictures of people we love, never grow tired of looking at them, and I hope that magic comes through so though the viewers don't know these peole, they still can feel some emotion. The people become icons, changing and reappearing here and there, sometimes exactly the same, as we remember certain moments of people that epitomize them, and sometimes changed, other aspects coming up as totally different personae. They can be put in different roles like actors, sometimes symbolizing two opposite extremes. That is a good way to explore the outer limits of cosmic individuality.
I also love the scenes, like the trees. I spent months wandering through old growth forests when I could, in the northwestern US, and in Canada, taking portraits of trees and of stumps that had been ruthlessly cut down, planning to make them into icons as well, for worship, once again. I love deserts, also, anywhere that will let me love it. I have found that trees that have been planted, after cutting down old growth, for the express purpose of being harvested, are harder to love. They don't accept it the same way, with as much trust, or capability. They know. And they were not seeded by love as the other trees naturally were, the universal love that allows seeds to be expressed by their mother trees into the soil that choses to nurture them at just the right spot. I am not drawn to photograph those trees.
I am helped in the technicalities of my work by a man named Dr. Simon Peter Hemingway. I could never do what I do without him. I was an artist my whole life, throwing myself into it fully sometimes more than others. But I didn't take advantage of the internet and cameras and scanner and printer and all the technical skills before I met him three years ago. My art is truly a creative partnership with him. He doesn't create it with me, but without his expertise, I would be floundering. He also models for me occasionally, and expressively, and takes me to many of the locations for my photography.

Love goes beyond a personal emotion, is a kind of physics, a kind of divine energy. All of my art is love, and a way to give to the world. It has within it an energy that can be called Tantric. Tantra is universal, a practice that arises to some degree from shamanistic intuition. It is particularly associated with the Eastern religions, and is akin to Taoist practices. It is a system of using the body to go beyond the body, to free the identities that are normally trapped within its boundaries, to let them expand into the larger selves we truly are. We are so much larger than bodies, or the individual incarnations and personalities we consider as us. That is what the feeling of longing in love comes from, I think, wanting to bridge the gaps we feel between us all.

But there are no gaps really, as we are not local, not tied down to points in time and space. When a couple practice Tantra together, they love not only as two selves, but as united flows of life force, seeing the world from a larger perspective, more powerful and blissful. In Tantra, love and sexuality can be an impetus to move that life force through our bodies, and we feel our bodies as conduits of the for the force, then we feel we are the force itself. Sexuality is therefore a kind of magic that is a portal to other dimensions of knowlege and ability, a way to free us from those forces that seek to hold us down in the sense of self that is created by our commercial society. We no longer are dependent, but free creatures. Tantra has a lot of fire to it, lots of electricity, acceptance of sexuality and the body, verve and color and celebration and explosive joy and experimentation and power that comes from discipline. I think these things come through in my art. Not only the intensity, but also the subtleties of dreamlike insights that arise out of it. My art should swim in a tangible atmosphere of love force, excitement and exhileration, which also includes the ability to look at and move through the sadness inherent in our lives.

www.digitalconsciousness.com/artists/TantraBensko

Today I scanned my very favorite pictures from several sets newly developed. Man alive were there some good ones to use in there.
Maybe I should write about that
Intense light of art
I take pictures usually with a Minolta and occasionally can afford to develop them, which can be a breathtaking time, when I scan my favorite ones and work them together, using all the older ones as source material too. Right now, I have a lot of photos from Burning Man in the desert windstorms of Nevada, Dada Ball scenes in Portland, and old growth trees from the northwest coast rainforests, peeling paint in the wet city of Olympia, foggy days at the bay I live on, and other surprises. soon they will be not photos but art.
I work with my pictures and use a kind of intensity of bright energy coursing through me to determine when it is just right, for example, getting it to just the contrast I want, something that sends me a kind of little shock. I like to do the same thing with modelling for myself or for other photographers. I pose and make miniature movements, slowing into the perfect pose, letting the energy move into the place where it goes into fast motion, taking into account the camera and camera man and viewer, and bring up a kind of tantric blast.
My art isn't limited to this kind of focus though, goes in dark and earthy directions in its subject matter. It has been called dangerous by a magazine editor who liked it. I like that. Dangerous.
I have spent much of my life as a healer and spiritual teacher, and Tantra teacher. Before that, I was a writing teacher for years in University. I wrote some books and edited a magazine. I also co-owned an art gallery in Montevallo, Alabama. I got my BA, MA, and MFA in writing, graduating from the famous Iowa Writers Workshop, and publishing poetry widely.I was married to an excellent poet for years and have a delightful son who is also my best friend. Now, I live with my partner in the far northwest.
I have been very involved me with the elements. I have tried to live without being unnecessarily trapped in the world of Corporate America and mind controlled masses. I have sought to help people deprogram from the manipulations in many ways. I have lived outdoors much of my life. I even lived across from the whitehouse for a few months, as part of a vigil. I lived in a packing crate next to sea lions. I lived in a forest with lots of bears walking around me in circles, as I lay on my blankets. I have lived in the center of the hood, in Atlanta. I spent a night doing the ghost dance, looking up at the arora borealis.

Tantragarden.com

I have so much art, you can go to all the places it's displayed on the web and still see a small part of it. Tantragarden.com is essential, though, to understand my work. It is playful, with hidden strangenesses. One of my favorite parts allows people to write in their own interpretation of one of my pieces. See if you can tell which replies are secretly me! I like the interactive things on the site, and my favorite is something with a hidden meaning I'd be happy to tell anyone about when they see it and email me. It is a bizzare happening that occurs a little ways in the gold gallery. The place I'd like to see people buy art from is art-photo-shop.com, which is in London, where they print editions of several interesting photographers, including myself.
On my website, Tantragarden, I'm about to put up an article about on of the photographers. I have a few art related articles I'm about to put on tantragarden, and hope to continue to write more. I want the site to be a place people can return to often and get something from. I'm working on a links page too, with not only art related but some other surprising things included. I hope to help out some artists I believe in to get more exposure through the site. And also to address some of the important things going on in the world around us.
Tantragarden recently won a golden web award, which tickled me. I think of
it as "our site", as Simon Hemingway is very much a part of it.
You asked if digital manipulation changed the way I see and work, Carol. I dream in it. At first, I dreamed incredibly beautiful light filled images one after another, transcendent, breathtaking, when my main focus was making the images on the screen, when they were pretty simple. Night was a dimension of art that woke me up into something intensely fantastic. Then, many of my dreams were navigated by the computer. I had to always be clicking and opening windows and superimposing and blurring and sometimes I forgot to save them or name them properly! Then, they turned into marketing dreams!
When I look at the world, I usually want to add more contrast with photoshop! And when I see something that looks beautiful, but has a part of it that could be a frame, I get excited, cause I can take a picture of that beautiful thing, which wouldn't be quite engaging mentally enough on its own, and add something to it to create a picture that would really excite me. Like, say if I'm exploring the back alleys in town, which are so exciting if you look at them as pictures, I can take parts of them and make them into frames for something else. So I can recapture the sense of excitement I see when looking at them, and bringing my consciousness and memories to the experience. Cause there's never just the wall, but the complexities of the consciousness of the viewer. So if I combine the two, it seems more like reality to me than a straight picture of the wall. The wall frame can be something that makes the other picture more iconographic, more obviously something phenomenological. Not just a straight picture, transparent in its media, but something that has a place in consciousness, is regarded in some way, interpreted, presented, and that becomes just as important as the actual image presented.
Sometimes, having images in "frames" within the pictures is a way to present the idea of compartmentalization of the self through the trauma of our corrupt society. Many people are compartmentalized in a terrible way, not me so much, but I very actively deal with people who are -- in the other part of my life. People's minds can be divided on purpose in order to make them more useful to people of manipulative intent, Satanists, secret society members, for example. Much of my art is very dark, as I address this kind of issue. It is almost a kind of war I wage against forces that are out there and art becomes a part of it, but very subtly. I like to keep my art as a kind of refuge for people to luxuriate in who are beaten down by our civilization. But even so, it needs to have some references to difficult truth in order to be comforting, or it is just fantasy escape. I like to make beauty out of the wounds.
And you ask about my hopes for my future. I'd like to be able to send these kinds of images telepathically! Not the answer you expected, most likely! I took some time off from doing much art for years, and that is kind of what I was doing. I resisted the computer, because I felt that we are supposed to be evolving our capabilities in ways that allow us to live more gently on earth. To be able to teleport instead of go to war over oil, kill animals on the highway, driving cars, take all the oil out from between tectonic plates....To be able to send images instead of use computers which must be made in very polluting ways. I was pretty strict with myself, living in a way that didn't compromise my values, living outside, eating what I foraged, as much as I could. I could only justify being more of a burden to the earth if I was really doing great good. I learned to send images. And to project my spirit so people would see it very clearly, to give them useful messages. I was very successful healer and spiritual teacher, doing my best to show others that they didn't have to just identify with the little body incarnation we have, as we are so much more. We aren't as solid as we look. We can be much more fluid and dreamlike, just like my art.
I liked doing art a lot, but partly, I was discouraged by how long it took to make a painting or woodcut, how hard it was to get it right, and how toxic all the supplies were. I got sick from the fumes. I had to live outside! Now, working with the computer, it is not toxic to me, and is not frustrating, but fits what I wanted to do very well. I can even send the images out to people right away through the internet, almost like telepathy! So it's not something I'll stop, now that those issues are resolved, until the world falls apart because we're using technology instead of telepathy!
I like to make art to give people a rush when they look at it. But back then, I decided that I would just go for their rush itself for a while, make it as productive a rush as possible, not connected to my ideas, my pictures, but whatever they needed. I found I have the talent to do that extremely well, my most important talent of my life. I was able to tune into their souls, send the specific energies needed to raise their consciousness level, their awareness, their frequency. In the process, they saw artistic images. It was like projecting art but not a hit and miss kind of thing like painting, but precisely what they needed to see in that moment. They loved it.
Now, I am doing that less than art, but in the future, I'd like to combine the two more. I'd like to slowly reveal more of the truths I see in the world through my art, when it is time. I'd like to be able to be a successful artist as much as possible in the rather grim future I suspect could be coming, which may not allow me much time. Kind of annoying! I want people to see the images in books, cd covers, and magazines and really enjoy them, have them accessible. From the feeback I'm getting from the art world, I think I'll be quite well known and my art will be worth quite a lot soon. I also want to not allow myself to become dependant on the trappings of physicality, to be able to go beyond its boundaries. Not everyone out there wants people to be able to do that, as it threatens their power. But I want to be able to still be an artist if I'm imprisoned and have no computer and paper. If I'm walking around in some kind of refuse filled city that once was, I still want to remain an artist. I don't want my ability to do that to be destroyed just because there may some day be no more luxury to use these tools such as a scanner and printer.
Interesting, interesting, Tantra - your energy is boundless and I know you will give inspiration to people who read this interview and maybe grab a little bit of your energy for themselves! The nights, under the stars with the bears, are an experience not many of us can own - and your "dangerous art?" Love it.

Tantra - would you like the last word?!

gosh, two sentences to sum it up. Makes me want to start talking about hominid women, who had breasts so large they swung them over their shoulders when they ran, and kept their babies on their backs, who could suck while their mothers ran. True! But probably would leave people wondering even more if I am sane. So I'll try something else:

Sorry Tantra - had to put that one in!

My art is not really so much about my own ideas, but ambiguous enough, I hope, to provoke feelings and associations in the viewers that are meaningful for them. I'd love to hear what they are.

ok. done. I do hope someone writes to me (tantragarden@earthlink.net).