Style Maniac 7.13.2014

If you’ve been reading Style Maniac for awhile, you know most often a featured work of art appears here not just because it’s pretty, but because the image/theme/title connect on some other level with life.  Remember Projects Brewing, way back in 2012?  One particular project of mine from then has been brewing, simmering and has now reached the boiling point.  Indeed, Time Is Of The Essence. The time has come to let it go and see what happens.

Stay tuned for more….

by Doreen Creede

Style Maniac

Gallery & Studio Summer 2014

Curating exhibitions is an art in itself and when the curator is herself a participating artist the exhibition is bound to be all the more artful. Thus curator Basha Maryanska gives us another thoughtfully assembled group exhibition in the show she calls ‘Art in Residency.’
Working mainly in oil and paint stick on canvas and wood panels, Sandra Benhaim creates what the artist refers to as “little pieces of landscape” within an overall context of abstraction. Elements of collage also figure prominently in Benhaim’s paintings: fragments of maps, colorful flyers, scraps of magazine pictures gathered from the painter’s trips to faraway places such as Paris and the Bahamas. A sense of windblown memories and fantasies comes across in paintings such as Benhaim’s “Carpet Ride Redux,” in which ornate bits of patterned paper float under and over areas of semitransparent and opaque areas of orange, blue, and pink paint suggesting sunlight, sea, and perhaps the pink flesh of bathers. In other paintings, such as “Exploring Ganymede,” the artist herself bathes in the freedom of pure painterly sensuousness, employing an entire palette of vibrant colors energized by her vigorous brushwork.
by Wilson Wong
Sandra Benhaim’s exhibit was reviewed in the June/July/August 2014 issue.

Style Maniac 12.5.2014

This play of light and dark, the rich bursts of exuberant color against moments of shade.  Once again Sandra Benhaim’s work speaks directly (at least for me) to the complexity of life here on earth:  joy and sadness, promise and disappointment, clarity and mystery.  Appropriately, it is named Terrestrial

by Doreen Creede

Style Maniac