Joan Benotti   Statement+Bio Work Curating Resume               Contact

 

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  I recently found a list I had written thirty years ago at the suggestion of an influential artist and friend, Enrico Pinardi. It was a list of materials and objects that inspired me or that I would like to incorporate into my work, among them: gold leaf, stamped edges, Renaissance red, correspondence, maps, wood scraps, those little figures at Tell Asmar, medieval story painting. My work, in fact, does incorporate most of these things. It is cut, ripped, patched, woven, sewn, painted, beaded, gilded, and frequently hinged. Often I build and attach articulated wooden shutters, or the pieces themselves are hinged so that they open and close altering the view. The painted surfaces are worked and reworked sometimes over several years as one layer wanders into the next in an ongoing dialogue between the story and the paint.


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Palette   Joan Benotti blends the actual with the abstract in mixed media pieces that integrate memory and story with pattern and place. Born in Boston, Benotti lived on the Bahamian Island of Eleuthera and more recently in South Africa. She now resides on Boston’s North Shore. She studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and printmaking at Montserrat College and received a grant from the Massachusetts State Council on the Arts in printmaking. Benotti was a founding member of the Bromfield Gallery, a Boston based artists’ cooperative, and an associate member of the Kingston Gallery in Boston’s SOWA district.