Key West The Newspaper

“Every day, the tropical light just rakes across vegetation, streets, and homes, creating these amazing lights and darks,” says Key West painter Rebecca Bennett, whose observations of the environment around her influence her work greatly. SALT Gallery celebrates Bennett’s newest exhibit and welcomes the public to a special preview from 6pm-8pm on Saturday, November 5 at their 830 Fleming Street location.

Bennett’s exhibit features more than 20 small realist abstractionist works of oils on paper framed in shadow boxes, highlighting her deft plein-air ability to merge light, space, memory, and observation via the geometric forms of Key West’s cottages and homes.

“For those of us who have lived most of our lives in Key West, the images evoked in Rebecca Bennett’s paintings remind us why we call this island our home,” says SALT Gallery owner Jeffrey Cardenas.

Though Bennett sailed into the Keys in 1989 and chartered trips to the backcountry for several years, her creative expression tends to lend itself to land; her studies at West Virginia State University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where she worked with constructed sculpture using welded steel and wood have also imprinted into her methods of painting.

“I like working with objects, like houses, rather than ethereal sea and sky,” she says. “Since I use soft edges and ambiguous forms, the geometry gives me a scaffold to hang the color while verticals and horizontals help organize light.”

Fans and newcomers to Bennett’s work will delight in her ability to transcend object into meditation with composition, color, light, touch, with paint as conduit—the painterly strokes of her brush evoking shape and movement, angular grays creating shadows, and the sense that we, too, are pedaling by the very space she’s painted, noticing the visual poetry of that moment as captured on paper.

Working on paper is her newest endeavor, and Bennett enjoys the “matrix” of what it offers— the immediacy of use, the variance of building thick layers or flowing thin, luminous color. Bennett prefers not to get boxed in to any one set way of creating, aiming more her work to be a vessel in which anyone can step into and be transported.

“I like ambiguity, getting the viewer to participate by engaging their imagination,” she says. “I want my paintings to be without commentary, even though I am painting specific things. I find if I really try to say something, it comes across as contrived. It’s more important to just follow your intuition, and hopefully content is provided by the viewer.”

Gallery owner Jeffrey Cardenas features a new artist each month at SALT Gallery; Bennett’s work will remain on display throughout November, accompanied by a limited edition catalogue. For more information, call 305.896.2980 or visit SaltIslandProvisions.com.