Amy Bennett’s raw talent is enough to make anyone stop and become transfixed by one of her paintings. With attractive color palettes and calculated brushwork, the subjects she paints hit home deeply because of their familiarity.
Maybe it’s the northeast suburban landscape featured in most of her paintings that makes each scene feel so recognizable. Amy lives and works in Cold Spring, NY which lays just north of the famous West Point Military Academy on the Hudson River. The town itself is exactly what you’d hope to find while getting away from the bustle of NYC on a short train ride via the Metro North, and a spot that feels like the imagery in Amy’s paintings.
Anniversary, a painting from her most recent exhibition, has a mid 2000’s champagne-colored Mercedes C300 juxtaposed by a Robin’s egg blue house shrouded by a large oak tree. There’s a nostalgia looking at her images of neighborhoods, churches, and backyards, they’re mostly ordinary settings but they come to life because the stories they tell remind you of something you know.
Before painting, Amy builds extremely detailed 3-D models of communities and landscapes which become the stage on which she develops her narratives. Her process is a piece of work itself and reminds me of the unseen details that go into manufacturing clothes.
Her series, At the Lake, is a personal favorite of mine, the collection depicts both winter and summer scenes that I recognize, most likely taking place somewhere in the Northeast of the United States. Setting up tents on the water’s edge, prepping for a hunter with high- vis gear on, dragging a canoe up onto shore near a lake house. All these images make me miss the experiences I have been lucky enough to have in my life.
She states on her website how the themes of time, isolation and transition run through her work, all of which feel very poignant right now. Amy asks for viewers to consider her work as a reminder of the persistence of change and the impermanence of everything. Life moves on and we’ll be back to these familiar scenes soon enough.
By: Adsum Founder, Pete Macnee
More on Amy Bennett here.
