I was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1960 and grew up in nearby Newport. I began to draw and paint regularly at age ten and went on in my teens taking private lessons and experimenting with drawing and printmaking in the studios of various artistic family members and friends. Throughout 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 was fortunate to be given a comprehensive introductory oil painting course by a fine realist painter named Peter Devine, who had recently moved to realism from abstraction but still adhered to many Modernist ideals and aesthetics. Peter gave me the foundation for the strongly formal realism that I practiced throughout my thirties and forties, as well as in the abstract and expressionist work I have been making alongside the realism since 1999. 

In 1979, I enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design, where I continued to study drawing, painting, and printmaking until withdrawing from the program in 1982 as it grew increasingly opposed to the kinds of work I wished to pursue. Later that year, I moved to New York City, where I continued independent study in its galleries and major museums while painting in my Brooklyn studio on weekends and at night and supporting myself as an apprentice cabinetmaker.

Throughout my twenties and early thirties I worked as a finish carpenter, contractor and builder, but I had also begun in the early 1980s to supplement my woodworking income with commissioned projects — painting seascapes, landscapes and portraits for clients mainly in the Northeast. I had my first solo gallery exhibition, of New York cityscapes and English landscapes, in my hometown of Newport, Rhode Island in 1986. Two years later I relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico where I began regularly exhibiting my architectural and landscape paintings in that city’s contemporary galleries in 1989.

For the past thirty-five years, I have lived, worked and exhibited for long periods on both coasts of the US and in the Southwest, spending seven and six years respectively in the San Francisco Bay Area and back again in Rhode Island (where I finished my degree at RISD in 2005) and again 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 exhibited in museums across the US. My paintings reside in private and museum collections throughout the United States and in private collections in Canada, the UK and France. I have also painted portraits for many private clients as well as official portraits of several college deans for Duke and Stanford Universities and most recently in a director's portrait for the North Dakota Museum of Art. 

— Christopher Benson, 2026