I was born in 1960 in Providence, Rhode Island and grew up there and in nearby Newport. I began to draw as a boy and experimented with both drawing and printmaking throughout my early teens. In those years I was also teaching myself to paint in oils. 

Between 1977 and ’79, while attending the alternative, arts-centric Woodstock Country School in South Woodstock, Vermont, I studied oil painting with the realist painter Peter Devine. Peter had recently made the shift from abstraction to representation but still kept to his Modernist ideals which laid the foundation for the strongly formal realism of my thirties and forties, as well as in the abstract and expressionist pictures I've made alongside that work since 1999. 

In 1979, I enrolled as a freshman at the Rhode Island School of Design where I continued to study drawing, printmaking and painting. I withdrew from the school however in 1982 as its painting program stopped supporting kind of work that interested me. I moved instead to New York City where I continued independent study in its galleries and major museums while supporting myself as a cabinetmaker and painting in my Brooklyn studio in my spare time and in occasional long breaks from the wood-shop.  

I had my first solo exhibition, of New York cityscapes and English landscapes, at a Rhode Island gallery in 1986. Two years later, I relocated to New Mexico where I soon began showing in Santa Fe's contemporary galleries.

Over the past thirty-eight years, I have lived, worked and exhibited for long periods on both coasts and in the Southwestern US — spending seven and six years respectively in the San Francisco Bay Area and back again in Rhode Island (where I finished my painting degree at RISD in 2005) then back in Santa Fe since 2006.

I received my first Pollock-Krasner foundation grant in 2002 and a second one in 2016. Since 2014, I have also regularly shown my paintings in museums across the country. My work is in private and institutional collections throughout the US and in private collections in Canada, the UK and France. 

— Christopher Benson, 2026