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By: a-n

Benet Spencer’s History Painting.

History Painting contains multiple elements woven into a loosely geometrical landscape. The wandering mind (or eye) places and locates the myriad elements within a field of forms, which is inhabited by polar bears, architectonic structures, elements of geometrical diagrams, philosophers and explorers (figures of the Enlightenment and early-Modern period), along with images of the natural world. The repeated iconography spread across a gridded landscape is reminiscent of either SimCity (or similar virtual panorama) or a traditional Japanese landscape painting. As with all of Spencer's paintings, the starting point is a computer-generated image. From here the process of painting takes over, building up through multiple layers of contrasting forms, using both acrylic and oil paint, as well as photographic and paper collage. The bottom layer is a William Morris design - an emblem of the back-to-nature response (to Modernity) of mid-Victorian Britain. Subsequent applications of paint partly obscure this under painting, and the imposition of a tight geometrical framework (with hexagonal columns) is intended to be evocative of the layering of cities, with an archaeology of earlier forms...

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