Shirra Benson
Using a highly personal approach to gestural abstraction, my work engages with both the natural environment and historical artifacts in a textural language that implies elements of both, as channeled through personal experience and the painting process itself.
With sgraffito, palette knives and other impasto-developing approaches and tools, the complex surfaces thus created function analogically, not as depictions of their sources but as responses to them, working with both the initial inspiration and the unplanned.
The imagery in my work replicates the elemental structures, forms and colours I see around me, in passages filled with frenetic activity as well as areas of calm. In every instance, I encourage the viewer to encounter the work from their own perspective, in order to allow for variations in interpretation.
Painting Plein Air for the first time in the Owen Sound 2023 Artwalk Competition.
(above) Hiking the Niagara Escarpment
Shirra Benson graduated from Georgian College in Fine Arts back in 2007. She took many years off from painting and followed her Equestrian Show Jumping dreams until she reached motherhood. She then continued down a different path of life surrounding herself in nature while exploring and hiking the Niagara Escarpment, The Bruce Trail and many other hiking areas within The Georgian Bay Area. She has exhibited widely throughout central Ontario in Owen Sound, Meaford, Thornbury, Collingwood and Southampton. Her work is held in many collections.
Nádúr
“Nature, constitution of the material world. Constitution of any particular thing; disposition, temper, mind; the nature, constitution or fitness of things; the sinful or depraved nature of man in a spiritual sense.”
— Quoted from: A Dictionary of the Gaelic Language
“Describing my own artwork is the most challenging part of being an artist… I feel deeply and release my energies onto the canvas. My style is developing and I am always playing and experimenting. I like to call this paint doodling if there is such a thing.”
“There is a distinct beauty in human-made artwork. Something that computers cannot ever replicate. My most recent abstract process is unplanned and intuitive in nature, that could never become a computer-generated work of art”
— Shirra
Contact
shirra@nadurartstudio.com
(647) 893-3096
Owen Sound River District, ON Canada