Audiences at the UGA Performing Arts Center expect big personalities and bigger sounds. From now through the summer, they’ll experience huge, colorful paintings as well.
Benjamin Britton, an associate professor at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, presents surface potential, a collection of four canvases over 7 feet tall, at the Performing Arts Center Lobby Gallery through August 8. A free artist reception will be held Wednesday, Jan. 29, from 5:00-6:00 p.m. in the upper lobby outside Ramsey Hall.
“I’m delighted,” Britton says. “It’s so nice to be able to share these paintings somewhere in town. I know how big the ceiling is here. It’s an excuse for me to deploy these paintings.”
Each of the canvases in surface potential is dominated by a multipart central form hovering bluntly over a landscape, while small globules of color and text shimmer over the surface and around the edges. Britton says the layers of perception were influenced by issues of memory and recall in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
“What they are,” Britton says of these canvases, “is an opportunity for me to make 12 abstract paintings in one painting.” While such intricate work on a confrontational scale could seem daunting, Britton says, “They’re totally made to be looked at. It’s about the pleasure of looking. ‘Fun for kids of all ages,’ I like to say.” And part of the game is finding images within images: “almost like breaking a rock in half and finding a fossil.”
BENJAMIN BRITTON
Britton is a painter who was born in 1976 and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY in 1999 and his MFA in painting from UCLA in 2008. His work has been shown primarily in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Atlanta. His paintings are in the collections of the High Museum, the Ballinglen Museum of Fine Art, and the West Collection. Britton’s work has been reviewed in Art in America and the LA Times, among others.
Britton has had solo shows at Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Santa Monica, and Frederieke Taylor Gallery in New York, among others. He is a recipient of the Chiaro Award in painting, an Artist-in-Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA, a recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle, Ireland, and a J.B. Blunk Residency from the Lucid Art Foundation in Inverness, CA. He teaches painting at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA.
The Performing Arts Center Lobby Gallery is open to the public Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (excluding holidays and University closures) and during all performances.