Structure and Imagery: Sensuality of Living: The Painting of Julian Bender

Monday, February 17, 2020

Sensuality of Living: The Painting of Julian Bender

queens command, 2018, 7.5 x 5 in, oil on pine

Julian Bender is a painter living and working in New England.
Bender's paintings display a structural hierarchy of form and color. They eschew an all over composition in favor of an amalgamation of forms. When the imagery veers more toward the figurative a subject / ground relationship can start to become evident but the distinction can very quickly disolve, charging the surface with a satisfying ambiguity.

bdyfrgn, 2018, 8.5 x 5 in, oil on pine

atcq, 2018, 5 x 6 in, oil on cedar


From the Artists Statement:

My materials are pencil, crayon and oil stick on wood. I consider myself a student of the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. I
have been absolutely enthralled with his work for almost a decade and it has altered me deeply.
Recently I am most touched by the work of Ezra Pound. My favorite painter, at the moment is, Francisco Mendes Moreira.
In school I studied musical composition and am a music school drop out.
Things I relish include ritual, the sensuality of living and the immersions of awe in nature.
I am a timber framer by trade. And work in the tradition of mortise and tenon joinery.
As a result of that study Russian avant-garde piano compositions from the early twentieth century hold a special place in my heart
as do the spectraland aleatoric composers of the mid century.
Most of my painting supports are scraps from my framing work.
Painting is a relationship, a ratio betweenwhat is known and what goes unkown.
After becoming a father of two my painting practice shifted radically from working on large paintings for long stretches of time to painting on a small scale,
often finishing a painting in one or two nights. I bring everything to the easel, my whole boiling being. What I leave behind are gestalts of the moment,
or day or week; my own personal Rorschach.

- Julian Bender