Paul Behnke

Paul Behnke, a painter from Yardley, PA, is the recipient of a Dedalus Foundation Award (the Dedalus Foundation was founded by Robert Motherwell during his lifetime, in order to foster the public understanding of modern art and Modernism).

Bright colors and canvasses dot the landscape of Paul’s studio like a flower garden, each with its own energy and composition, both in harmony and competition with each other.  He is influenced by British painters of the late 1950s, early 1960s such as Patrick Heron and John Hoyland due to their personal and literary take on abstract expressionism. “They were a little insular, had a more quirky vision, not main stream.”

Behnke heard about VSC from friends who had come here and wanted to do a residency for several reasons; his romantic notion of artist lifestyles of the New York School of the ‘50s and ‘60s make him nostalgic for a modern-day Cedar bar. His home studio satisfies this need because it is a public art building where he meets artists with similar concerns to his, somewhere between overly emotional and formal. He thinks about “communicating the reality of the image, mark making, fast and slow, thick and thin, straight-edged and sloppy, about materials and the process.” He doesn’t think about subject matter, but when certain images reoccur, he begins to recognize them and accept them as subject matter. 

Content is his excuse to paint much the way landscape is an excuse to paint for Lois Dodd.

photo courtesy of Howard Romero