At sixty-five, Christopher Benson has been making oil paintings for over fifty years, tackling many subjects in that time, from urban architectural street scenes to land and seascapes both real and imagined, and even to full-on abstractions. His style runs the gamut from hard-edged realist and abstract formalism to more gestural expressionism.

Benson began painting in his native New England and has continued to do so while living for long periods on both American coasts and in the desert Southwest.

Across all those locales and styles, the one persistent theme of his work has been the subtle materiality of oil paint itself, which he explores in skillfully worked surfaces of calligraphic marks, color harmonies and formal compositions that are as much about his physical medium as any of the subjects or narratives he uses it to describe.

Since his earliest exhibitions in the late 1970s, the vast majority of Benson’s career output has found homes in private collections throughout the United States and abroad, and over the past decade also in the permanent collections of numerous American museums. Some examples of his larger works in oil can be found in Colorado at The Denver Art Museum, in Ohio at the Dayton Art Institute, in Texas at the Museum of the Southwest, in Rhode Island at the Newport Art Museum, and in North Dakota at the North Dakota Museum of Art. He also has works on paper in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and at The Yale University Art Gallery in Connecticut.

A prolific essayist, author and a designer and publisher of books about art and artists, Benson is also a skilled digital imaging expert and limited-editions printer. His limited-edition books are in the special collections libraries at Stanford, Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale and Brigham Young Universities, and also at the Rhode Island School of Design.

For the past eighteen years, Benson has lived with his educator wife, Dr. Cybele Leverett, and their sons William and Fisher, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.