‘My Still Life’ — The Resurgence of the Still Life Painter
March 2020 marked the moment when things would change forever. The month started like any other, but by the end governors and political officials all across America had shut down major businesses and academic institutions and even imposed curfews for their residents. 2020 marked the start of quarantine, a decision made following rising infection, hospitalization, and mortality rates due to SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19.
What if you could turn back the clock or visit the version of you before everything changed? What would you see? How would you feel?
These are all questions answered by The Galleries at Kean’s newest exhibition, “My Still Life,” created by Boston-based photographer and painter, Teddy Benfield.
Described as a reflection of a “post-pandemic consciousness, where interiority serves as both a physical and psychological space” by The Galleries at Kean, the series of artworks explore some of the small moments we had pre-pandemic that have become beautiful memories we long to recreate, and some of those moments after that encouraged us to take a moment to breathe.
The art pieces are a collection of still life paintings, Benfield’s specialty.
“My work is so focused in still lifes, specifically…still life as a genre, you know, it’s sort of, over the years, it’s been forgotten, or it’s been disrespected,” he said. “If you look back at like all the famous, whether it be religious paintings or portraiture, whatever it may be, landscapes, still life has always been at the bottom there, that’s something that I‘ve always found fascinating.”
Although it’s his passion now, Benfield wasn’t always the painter he is today; his strengths lie in being the kid who found the beauty in what many kids today might simply walk past.
“I grew up really into– I still am–surfing, I used to skateboard a lot, and I was just really drawn to photography and logos and the designs on the bottom of skateboards and stuff like that,” Benefield thinks. “I remember traveling to New York City once or twice a year with my parents as a kid and going to like the MET or the Museum of Modern Art and really like not knowing how to put it into words at a young age, but knowing, I like this.”
However, Benfield didn’t begin his journey in art there, and even after taking a high school photography class, he wasn’t honestly sure who he would be or who he wanted to be until college.
“Then once I was in college, I really didn’t have a lot of direction,” he remembers “I was try trying to play sports, I was majoring in something I had no interest in, and I realized I was taking a lot of art classes and really enjoying them and it wasn’t really like my work was great or I knew the direction I wanted to go in but it was something about the classes that I liked.”
Benfield was in his sophomore year of college when painting became his passion. And as someone who’s always appreciated the small things, still lifes became an outlet to deepen his appreciation.
“A lot of the time still lifes is sort of a way to show off what we have, I look back at like Rembrandt and that era of Dutch master painters, you know a lot of it was showing off like ‘I have this wonderful steel plate’ or ‘I have this pineapple from a foreign country that no one here has ever seen before,” Benfield said.
But as the photographer he is, Benfield has drawn a line between the photograph and the intimacy of the still life, “A lot of my work has to do with COVID and how we set up our spaces and our life as human beings during and post the pandemic,” Benfield explains. “So if I could have a person come in and sort of see the similarities between what I’m painting and their own lives, like ‘That reminds me of my backyard’ or ‘ That looks like my grandma’s house.’ Little connections like that are really important to me.”
Through his storytelling, Benfield has turned back the clock and connected with people through chairs, light bulbs, and a love seat, precious memories captured forever on canvas as a still life.
