Noho Studios
46 Great Titchfield Street
London W1W 7QA
Viewing Times:
19th Oct: 6-9pm (Private View)
20th - 22nd Oct: 11 - 5pm
Ben Crase is a self-taught figurative artist whose oil and oil stick works tilt to the historic narrative around the settlement of America's West during the 19th Century and beyond. Now based in San Diego, Ben grew up in Butte, Montana, collecting childhood memories which centre around the cultural alchemy that defined the region in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Named after a word that dominated his childhood and today retains an intrinsic link to nostalgia and place, Ponderosa is Ben's latest body of work. The series of paintings and works on paper continues the story depicted in Ben's previous works with the silhouette of the tall, slender, Ponderosa Pine dovetailed across the breadth of the series to symbolise the deep significance of his early Montana home. Within the frame of each vignette, Ben impresses joyfully bold colours, domesticated textiles and furniture pieces, loose limbed men and myriad connotations of the American West that have built its now globally recognisable visual architecture - saloons, cowboy figments, depictions of men imbibing.
Through his orchestration of atmospheres of genteel celebration, Ben introduces the possibility of understanding and camaraderies through scenes where man and beast co-exist in peaceful repose as protectors of one another; where the appearance of the protagonists pink hats radiate harmony.
There is a charming exuberance within Ben's paintings. Populated with personal meaning and the considered probing into a subject which is fundamentally flawed yet so overtly misunderstood, Ben bestows a sense of empathy, equality and optimism which, through the lens of his medium, rewrites the troubled past as simply the collecitve story of us, the good guys.
Text by Tiffany Jade