Bio

Sarah Benson is an American artist based in Austin, Texas and originally from Berkeley, California. She painted throughout the 1990s and worked in the film industry before deciding to pursue a degree in Historic Preservation. She returned to painting and sculpture in 2019.

Statement

In my work, I use color and shape to explore themes of relationship, presence, and ambiguity. My work is small and intimate in scale, but with a confident architecture of its own. I paint on paper with acrylic paint, also using colored pencils and gel pen. I take cues from the realms of collage, sculpture, abstraction, and minimalism.

Process is critical to my practice. Building a painting, I slowly construct layers of color and form, playing with transparency, physicality, and even emotion. I frequently use the same shapes, cut from paper, over and over. I am really interested in the small moments that result, for example where one shape abuts another in some new way, or two forms overlap, creating new shapes or adjacencies. I am also simply riveted by colors, light, and the subtle volumes of the painted surface - and I all but insist that my viewer become riveted as well.