Bridget Benton
About Bridget
Bridget Benton is an Asheville, NC based mixed media collage artist layering nature print, photography, found materials, and expressive mark-making with encaustic wax. Benton uses the layers of translucent and opaque wax paint to selectively conceal and reveal the layered elements, mimicking memory. Bridget describes her work as “an attempt to capture the impact of a specific experience, a kind of mapping of an internal landscape.” She has shown work in galleries from Portland, Oregon, to Listowel, Ireland and her work is in private collections from Canada to Australia.
During her 30+ years as a working and teaching artist, Bridget has established herself as a passionate educator, guided by curiosity. Her master’s degree focused on the study of the creative process, which informs not only her own work but also her teaching. She is the author of the award-winning workshop in a book, The Creative Conversation: ArtMaking as Playful Prayer, and works with adults to help them find their own unique creative voice.Globally, she has led over 100 workshops and classes, including sessions for the Creative Problem Solving Institute in Buffalo, NY. This is Bridget’s 4th year with the Painting With Fire Encaustic Masterclass. She is a member of the River Arts District Artists in Asheville, showing and teaching at 310Art. As part of supporting creative community and education, Bridget has been involved in leadership positions in several non-profit arts organizations, including the Nature Printing Society and the International Encaustic Artists.
You can view Bridget’s work at:
www.BridgetBentonArt.com
www.instagram.com/BridgetBentonArtist
Class Details
Bare Bones Color Mixing: Working with a Split-Primary Palette
Everyone knows that blue and red make purple, right? Except when they don’t! This is the color refresher you didn’t know you needed, with low-jargon explanations about how to get the most from your encaustic paints.
This is everything Bridget forgot from her college art classes, and had to re-teach herself in her forties. You’ll learn how to read paint labels, the difference between transparent and opaque pigments, what a split-primary palette is and how to select one! With both theory and practical advice, this will set you up to mix almost any color you want from just seven blocks of paint. Plus, Bridget will share tips, tricks, and hacks for labeling your paints, setting up your griddle, and mixing color, as well as ways to successfully expand and limit your palette.
Intuitive Starts: Loose Underpainting and Irish Inspirations
In the fall of 2023, Bridget was both leaving her marriage and leaving for a month-long art residency in Ireland with fellow painter Kelly Williams. Out of necessity, Bridget started doing more work on paper. At the same time, a break from anxiety and perfectionism, Bridget experimented. Starting her paintings with loose strokes of India ink, gentle washes of color, and torn up romance novels gave her a fresh start. While she had been exploring underpainting and working on paper for some time, this approach was the beginning of a new direction in her work.
In this video, Bridget shares the methods she has developed – some inspired by her time working side-by-side with Kelly Williams in Ireland - for starting encaustic paintings in this way, as well as how to use this as part of an art journaling practice.
