Anthony Benjamin
Referred to as a 'polymathic artist' by critic Rosemary Simmons when writing about his work for the Borderline Images By Anthony Benjamin show at The Graffiti Gallery in 1979.
He began his study at Southall Technical College in 1947 as an engineering draughtsman and was accepted into Regent Street Polytechnic, now known as the University of Westminster (1950–1954).
Born in Boarhunt, Hampshire he endured a difficult childhood, due to an unstable family life and being a wartime London evacuee.
Anthony had an aptitude for careful drawing, as well as an appreciation and understanding of the logical principals of three-dimensional construction, but the lack of creative possibilities frustrated him.
Using a restricted, almost monochromatic palette, his subject matter featured the surroundings of the dark basement flat he shared with fellow student and partner, Stella, whom he drew and painted many times.
On graduating from college in 1954, his paintings were accepted for exhibition by Helen Lesore, the hardline, Social Realist director of the Beaux Arts Gallery, the London home of the kitchen-sink artists.
However, when he started using a broader range of colour and looser brushwork, including elements of abstraction, he was told by Lesore to toe the line or leave the gallery.
St. Ives had been dominated by the influence of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth but by 1956 the "Middle Generation" of Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, Bryan Wynter and Terry Frost were becoming well established in Britain and were soon to be known in New York City.
When in 1959 he was awarded a coveted French Government Bourse to study etching at S W Hayter's, renown Atelier 17 in Paris, (where some revolutionary new techniques of plate making and colour printing were being explored) he took with him a copy of the recently published collection of Graham's poems titled The Night Fishing.
Some test proofs were printed at the time, but the plates were not editioned somehow they were misplaced during a studio move and not found again until the late 1990s when Anthony's nephew and printer, Simon Marsh discovered them, still wrapped in a French newspaper.
He was struck by the use of repeated flat geometrical shapes in many works, particularly by the strong impact and visual rhythm set up by the rows of saint's halos in Duccio's 'Madonna in Majesty' in the Siena Duomo.
When he returned to London in mid-1961 this rediscovery of defined, flat shapes, shallow but articulate space and much more vibrant colour informed his new painting.
He did not want to follow the conventional sculptural approach of carving and modelling figure like shapes from the usual materials, stone, wood, clay, etc.
Intense glowing colour and reflections; amorphous and ambiguous shapes he wanted to create works that crossed the conventional boundaries.
Working with Nancy Patterson, a Canadian artist and industrial model maker, they started making maquettes for larger pieces, using both the opaque and the transparent, fluorescent coloured Perspex.
Intense heat was used to bend the shiny, expensive and unforgiving material into undulating ribbons that flowed off the rectangular 'bases' that were fixed to the walls.
After a long and enthusiastic conversation about the new possibilities, Anthony was inspired to make some screen prints that paralleled visually the effects that Eno produced with electronics.
Working in partnership with master silkscreen printer, Kevin Harris, the suite of six images they named Roxy Bias was the produced by a complicated method of interchangeable stencils and endless colour proofing.
In such works, he also managed to create a spatial separation between these geometric figures and the endlessly varied grounds … To achieve the degree of density and intensity required he developed a complex method of masking to ensure the precision of their straight edges.
He was also revisiting and developing the spatial and colour concepts, and the connection to musical ideas that he had first explored in the 1970s in the Roxy Bias Screen prints, establishing surface rhythms by the use of repeated geometrical shapes that he had discovered in the early Italian Renaissance paintings and used in his own work in the 1960s.
