Category: Philadelphia

Hidden Figure, Under The Radar: BENSIGNOR an Artist

Diane Waldman, Deputy Director of the Guggenheim Museum of Art wrote about Bensignor’s work, “ an example of a extremely original treatment of the landscape”…

Artists don’t give up their secrets easily. Her work is madly complex. It is only after minutes of staring at her work do the effects start to appear.

A painting idea can start in one moment or it can be imagined over the course of several years. She works primarily in oil paint.

It takes time. It is a balancing act and she worries about the work constantly.

It is about the transitions between color, line, shape, scale and tones.

The palette is deceiving; it has various shades of blues, greens, oranges, purples, reds and yellows.

The brush strokes vary from line to blurred color.

Her perspective is a use of a combination of eastern perspective, for example: atmospheric, linear, optic, scale, and western perspective, for example: the use of one, two and three point perspective.

There is no beginning and no end. The work tells her what to do and long and intensive study.

The total effect is memorizing. Your eye settles here and there drawn to one place and then another, dancing around and around transcending from the real world into an inner world.

The viewer is stopped and drawn into the surface, while the theme of the landscape plays around and around in the brain. The landscape painting, like nature itself, cannot be perceived in one viewing. The paintings can be and are demanding.

They play with the surface like a Jazz musician playing a standard tune. Then the improvisation takes to changes of rhythms and harmony, counterpoint and back to the standard structure.

As one is drawn back to the painting, each time, they appear richer and richer.

Bensignor has been painting a long time, and she says it is a process, but she admits to not knowing exactly what is going on. It is a process. The constant decisions and decisions: to either to take something out or risk repainting the whole thing or building it up or leaving the work alone.

The painting maybe done, but the theme is not. She believes each one of us has a story to tell. She has the one story to tell over and over again in different ways.

Her story it is that people are born with an individual personality and a need to learn how to become human. Life is tough and how we navigate and become human separates us from the wild. Basically, it is just a dance, a rhythm about life, good vs. evil, the tamed and the untamed.

Her use of the image of “ Landscape” becomes the metaphor for tame over wild or good over evil, as seen in her show “Between Garden and Wood”.

The show is at, The Rodger LaPelle Galleries, 122n. 3rd Street, Philadelphia PA 19106 through May 2017. The paintings interact with each other in a way they were placed around the gallery.

She doesn’t take prisoners. It is what it is. What she says on canvas isn’t a choice; it is who she is, period. Refusing to be categorized she will not stop working.

It is a fact that some collectors can’t deal with the idea of collecting art by women. Hidden female artists are slowly being recognized and into the radar of acceptance they are going to make their mark.

Examples of her work: