Stephen Bennett

Stephen Bennett is an American painter who spent over twenty years traveling to more than thirty countrys looking for faces. He finds indigenous people in places like Namibia, Tahiti, and Papua New Guinea, and he paints them big sometimes seven feet tall. He grinds his own paint from raw pigments, mixing colors that dont follow nature. A face might have greens and purples in the cheeks, blues across the forehead. He starts with a photograph, but then he lets the colors tell him what to do. He once said the first color he picks just feels right and then he follows it.

What makes his work stick with you is the eyes. He paints them straight on, close up, like the person is right there in the room with you. Old faces, young faces, wrinkled and weathered or smooth and young, he treats them all the same way with care and a kind of celebration. He started a nonprofit called Faces of the World to teach art to kids and bring cultures together. He believes we are all one people, and his paintings feel like he really means it. You dont look at them, you meet them.