Easel Painting by Ben Wannamaker

Based in Toronto

Easel Painting, Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 2024, 20x16

I am a skateboarder raised with the mid to late 90s and early 2000s aesthetic of in-your-face, fisheye lens omnipresence. The contemporary rise of the 0.5 convex camera setting is now ubiquitous and in all of our pockets. This setting makes the most mundane images dramatic and enthralling. I like to mythologize my life with my paintings. The dramatic light inside my studio created, to me, an undeniable vestige of a moment between the sun and my easel one late fall afternoon, so I took a photo as a reference and executed this painting (using the painting’s subject to paint the painting, too) relatively quickly.

The interior studio paintings of Lucien Freud, Lorenzo Amos, and Maria Lassnig are also extremely appealing to me in their frankness, urgency, immediacy and all that is implied about the artist’s hand and what their art demands of them.

I often work on multiple pieces at once in incremental bursts of concentrated energy done between long periods of just looking, but this painting was done with my full attention and took two or three lengthy sessions over the course of a day or two. The paintings I like are those with immediate impact that also unveil new surprises slowly over time. I enjoy paintings that encourage me to circle back, when the eye settles on a work to find the things I first loved about the work are fresh and new again. Subject is often secondary in works like these, and that gives them longevity. The hand of the artist and the temperament and tempo of the paintings can be seen blatantly on the surface and in the content of the material and application, as well as the visual vehicles of the time, place, and person who made them. Subject be damned. A sun, a chair, a fish, a cloud, a tit, a skull, a flower, a lover, a carpet, a beer, scissors, a bed, a stranger: it really doesn’t matter.