On Thursday, July 9, from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm, Southern Breeze Gallery invites you to enjoy Ben Purvis’ most recent “Bayou Impressions,” exquisite oil paintings depicting the streams, tributaries and rivers of the South.

Ben’s first artistic inclinations took shape as a youngster watching his older sister win a variety of art shows in the community and seeing his architect father paint landscape and wildlife watercolors in his spare time. Years later, Ben took “First” and “Best of Show” in the same exhibitions that his sister had entered. He went on to receive a BFA from Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida with a major in illustration. That school’s regime gave him the opportunity to develop his extraordinary versatility.

Ben’s landscapes, portraits, figures, illustrations, and real-estate drawings are testimony not only to the extensive training he received during his BFA program but also to his native talent. While he paints primarily in oils, he is equally comfortable in acrylic, watercolor, guache, pen and ink, pastel and pencil.

His wide repertoire includes the notable Bayou Impression series which is gaining increasing attention at the national level and which will be featured in the up-coming show. The series consists of tonal, impressionistic abstracts of southern bayous. It is evocative and haunting. Its paintings bring to life sky, earth, water, mist and light worked into beautiful symmetries
 

Ben has developed a singular technique and style to render the paintings of this series. It began accidentally. One day, unhappy with what he had painted, Ben threw turpentine thinner onto the canvas. While staring at the changed painting he experienced an epiphany and picked up the palette knife to add sky and water. This was the first of the series of Bayous Impressions. Ben continues to paint this series by manipulating the medium with palette knife and brush stroke and by “flinging and flicking” the paint onto the canvas. He sprays turpentine at strategic points in the process. The final product is a textured representation of water coursing through extended breaches in standing growth—forest, grove or marsh—to lake or pool or bayou rimmed with more standing growth. Light is central to these paintings. Ben uses it as a structural and a tonal element. Typically, but not exclusively, these paintings are constructed to embody a profound and plain symmetry, often in tryptich format. The total effect is an archetypical resonator for Nature and embodied existence as “watercourses” to ultimate destinations, such as “the knowledge of who we really are” or “the ideals we long to achieve” or “the primal abundance and purity which we remember through the lore of our collective past.” These paintings of bayous and watercourses tend to generate an eager and fervent response in viewers.

When Ben’s father fell ill with cancer, Ben went to Texas to be with him. For a brief time the two of them manifested a life-long dream, producing and showing art together in local exhibitions. Before he died Ben’s father extracted a promise. He asked Ben to follow his dream as an artist and to never give it up. Ben’s continuing development and his creative productivity are concrete demonstrations of his intent is to keep that promise.

Ben’s paintings hang in many galleries and are held in corporate and private collections throughout the country.