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

Between 1977 and ’79, while attending the arts-centric Woodstock Country School in Vermont, I studied oil painting with the realist painter Peter Devine. 

I enrolled as a freshman at the Rhode Island School of Design in the fall of 1979, where I continued to study drawing, printmaking and painting. I withdrew from the school however in 1982 as its painting program stopped supporting the kind of work that interested me at the time. I moved instead to New York City where I regularly visited its galleries and museums while supporting myself as a cabinetmaker.  

I had my first solo exhibition back in Rhode Island 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 a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2002 and also a second one in 2016. Since 2014, I have also regularly shown 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