I was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1960 and grew up in nearby Newport, where I began to study drawing and painting at age ten. My first formal instruction was in a private summer drawing class taught by a family friend, the calligrapher and graphic designer Raphael Boguslav, who had previously taught drawing in New York City at the Cooper Union. I also began attending regular life-drawing sessions with a group of older local artists in both Newport and Providence at age thirteen. From ages fourteen to sixteen, I began teaching myself to paint in oils, both in original figurative portraits and genre scenes and also by copying Old Master works by painters such as DaVinci, Vermeer and Rembrandt. At sixteen I also began to study and make etchings, again by looking especially at Rembrandt’s etched works.

Between 1977 and ’79, while attending the Woodstock Country School in South Woodstock, Vermont, I completed a comprehensive introductory oil painting course taught by a realist painter named Peter Devine, who had recently moved to realism from abstraction but still adhered to many Modernist ideals and aesthetics. This was the origin of the strongly formal realism that I practiced throughout my thirties and forties, as well as in the abstract work that 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 types of work I wished to pursue. Later that year, I moved to New York, where I continued independent study in that city’s major museums and painted in my Brooklyn studio on weekends and at night while supporting myself as an apprentice cabinetmaker.

In 1984, I began to supplement my woodworking income with commissioned projects, painting seascapes landscapes and portraits for numerous collectors in the Northeast. I had my first solo gallery exhibition — of New York cityscapes and English landscapes — in 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.

— Christopher Benson, 2025