MEET THE ARTIST: Saturday, June 7th, 2-5pm
Ben Schwab’s paintings are simultaneously about specific locations and about the universal experience of a place. This idea of ‘here’ and ‘there’ is a through-line in Schwab’s work – what makes a space or landscape or city familiar versus the vistas that are other. This push and pull drives a dynamism in the mark-marking and use of layering. Schwab is focusing in on the essentials – reducing down to the shapes that are the building blocks of the structures he is depicting. While geometric, there is strong sense of the hand of the artist in the paintings – they are ordered chaos.
Schwab’s preparation for a new painting involves deep study of the locale. The pace, the color palette, and way the buildings interact with each other and the landscape. His earlier work was focused on depicting these spaces in specific detail. As his work has grown and evolved, Schwab has moved away from the idea of rendering each brick or power line and moved into capturing the essence of a place – the mood, the intensity, the wonder.
Schwab has long been fascinated with the dynamics of cities, where one can concurrently observe decay and vitality, expansion and contraction, history and impermanence. Schwab explores these themes through his brushwork and layering process – he is combining and manipulating images to capture multiple views and introduce a sense of abstraction. The resulting painting is about a place that is both familiar and unfamiliar, where the lines between here and there are blurred.
BEN SCHWAB received his BFA in Painting from Missouri State University (Springfield, MO) and his MFA in Painting from Indiana University (Bloomington, IN). Schwab’s work has been featured in numerous gallery and university exhibitions throughout the United States, including the at the Delaware Art Museum (Wilmington, DE). He is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, a Vermont Studio Center Residency Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Strategic Opportunity Stipend, and the Career Development Program Fellowship from The Center for Emerging Visual Artists. His work is included in numerous private collections as well as the permanent collections of Oak View Group, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Capital One/MIT, HUB International, Strategic Hotels, Federal Capital Partners, Barkan Companies, Sheraton Hotels, Mass General Brigham, and Hub50House, among others. Schwab lives and works as a full-time artist in Upstate New York.
