Andrew Bennet
I was doing physics - aiming to become an astronomer, then I met Graham Townsend (a prominent Australian painter) and really liked what he was doing. It must have pricked my psyche and like a small seed it grew and grew. Every holiday I’d be down at his place painting and drawing. This was at the age of seventeen and I’d never painted or drawn before that. I applied to Art school but then went to study physics for a year instead and, after a year, realised it was the wrong thing to be doing. Part of the reason for doing physics was security but after a while I decided to take the risk and go for painting. I couldn’t get it out of my system. I went to art school But didn’t learn much, I learned more about my art in the studio. I spent a year in the studio being poor, scraping the money together to buy canvases, and at the end of the year I approached a gallery - the Eddie Glastra Gallery in Paddington. He was very cool on me to start with and then, slowly but surely, we sold more pictures and he came around to what I was doing. After three years I went to him and said “I think I should have a show” and he said “I’ve been waiting six months for you to ask me that.” We put a show together and it did really well. The first two days sold the show out and my career had started! I’ve had
Absolutely, because I love travelling here. When I’m running low on ideas I go on a big trip and absorb the scenery. It usually takes about six months before the ideas crystallise. It’s easy to be a journalist and just document, it’s much harder to distill the best elements from the landscape and see how it affects you and what you want to talk about in that landscape.
T.U. Have you travelled much outside Australia? Only once - I did a really big trip last year through the States and Southern Europe. That’s come through in the last show a bit. The south western states of America were fabulous - a bit like Australia but more vertical. Europe was another thing altogether because the culture of the place has modelled the landscape. Here it is the forces of nature but there it’s hundreds of years of culture. Ruins, churches and villages are everywhere. That was a new key into the landscape that I hadn’t had before, I really enjoyed that. T.U. What about the politics of art in Australia? I’m very aware of it but I try and skirt my way around it. Institutional policy of what gets bought, what gets collected and what doesn’t is dictated too much by fashion rather than quality of work. I know quality is a slippery subject but personally I think it is the moulding of craft and vision. There’s nothing like bureaucracy to kill vision and there’s nothing like chasing a grant to kill craft.
I don’t really care about recognition as long as I can paint the paintings I want to paint. That’s the reason I’m doing this - to be in the studio and make the best art I can.
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