I first visited Aspen as a college freshman art student on Christmas break in 1965. I naturally found my way to Tom and Betty’s newly built, three story home, art studio, silkscreen foundry, and gallery, located next to what is now Little Annie’s Eating House. It would be one of my fondest and enduring memories of “early” aspen”
I couldn’t afford any of Tom’s $10.00 & up posters and serigraphs-a fact that my shaggy, anarchist, but carfefully engendured appearance made obvious to anyone but me. The Benton’s, however, took me in, took the time and effort to talk to me of fine arts and finance and cabbages and kings.
As a burgeoning “back east” activist and future commerical artist I felt enriched by that encounter with Tom and Betty. It was, perhaps, the first crafts-kinship of my own artistic career-all this quickened by the realization that, yes, it was possible to make a living as an artist in a ski town.
Three venues I persued with zeal myself over the next 40 years!
There is promise in beauty and poetry and nature, and there is fight in man. We are blessed with love and art, and obligated to defend them, not by the destruction of our enemy, alone, but by the cultivation of our wholeness.
If we are going to talk about Benton, it should be by way of the Shinto and the night sky, and in the name of the Aspen Liberation Party. There are artists who are able to transform our common birthright of suffering into wonderment by a simultaneous strength of will and a complete surrendering. If you have an inclination towards such a vocation, there is no guarantee about anything working out for the better, or for any certain success or comfort at all. But the one thing that I can see that is even more inspiring than the tenacity required to embrace this destiny is the strange miracle of finding others who have gotten themselves into the same stubborn mode of operation, the artist’s life, and with them feeling, across generations, across the ages, a sense of communion, of kinship, of buoyancy through a shared commitment to a beautifully quixotic battle.
I was born in Aspen in ’74. This means mostly that Tom Benton’s art and posters were as essential as parkas in the houses of the people I knew. I still find myself thinking on occasion “Eagle feathers bound in wax won’t take us to the sun, the dream’s the thing, our holy wings, our journey’s just begun” (Joe Henry). “Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow” (T.S. Eliot). “I saw a white bird once/on a wild coast/and fell in love/with this dream that obsesses me.” (Akiko). Because these were poems that Benton’s art helped to stick in my heart. He helped make poetry matter to me, and art matter to me. Later, as we became friends, he helped me believe that it mattered that I cared about these things, and tended to them.
The two most prevalent strains of Benton’s gift: a sublime nocturne meditation in which darkness is searched deeply until the first hints of light are revealed, and a commitment to harmony with the deeper mysteries of nature, both reveal themselves in his work, not by pigmentation or form alone, but by deed and act within the larger community.
If you ever visited Benton in his studio at night, you realized you were visiting the studio of an artist working in a forest in the heart of a Galaxy. Buckminster Fuller called our ride Spaceship Earth. Having lost the darkness of High Alpine Night to the light-polluted cities you might forget where we are, but in the wilderness that surrounded Benton’s studio, you’d remember. At the door to the Garden of Agony, the blackness was opalescent. Benton painted this sky again and again, but he painted it as it was the very soul within him, as if by examining our own darkness long enough, we can see the whole universe suddenly illuminating within us, a great expanse. This is both a death and an awakening. Winters are cold and long and painting can keep you awake for days at a time, and the question becomes what else holds us together on the edge of any abyss, what shapes all bodies into orbs, but gravity? Are we shackled or enwombed, who can say?
And the bird is a witness when there’s no one else to see.
