Lamp

8/19/2026 0 Comments

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On the Seto Inland Sea
the Work of Peter Helinski and Benjamin Heiken at One Wall Gallery

by Benjamin Terrell

Seen depicted on pottery shards washed up on the beaches of the Seto Inland Sea: Pine and plum, geese and reeds, rabbits and dragons in moon and mist, paulownia tree or paulownia leaf, folding fans and chrysanthemums, a single carp or tortoise with waves, a single horse on a hill, a solitary man rowing his boat.

Work by Benjamin Heiken (left and center) and Peter Helinski (right)
at One Wall Gallery in Eugene, Oregon.
August - September, 2026

Kaolin clay from Kyushu, feldspar, wood ash, rice straw ash, pine ash, copper for the rare green, Persian cobalt coming from China through the turbulent East China Sea.

Helinski (left) and Heiken (right)

Boats slowly loaded, overloaded, overconfident merchants caught in typhoons, capsized, broken boats deliberately dumping broken cargo, eroding villages tossing inferior kiln loads, offerings to war and to water. History revealing itself in the smallest of pieces.

The whole world has never not been broken things viewed as whole or whole things seen as broken. Even we are minute particles forged by forgetfulness, held together by assumptions.

I also found pottery shards in the fields where Van Gogh lived and painted. More utilitarian in purpose - bits of brick, broken clay vessels and discarded crockery meant to make the soil better, richer. Van Gogh too walked over similar broken pieces, unbeknownst that he too was a future shard for constant reinterpretation.

Heiken (center) and Helinski (left and right)

This world we walk is itself an ocean, and also an ocean floor. I imagine even time is a mosaic of fragments. Both facts and feelings arrive incomplete in service of something larger and unknowable. Even art can only be contextualized for so long, destined for another wall, another floor.

On Peter Helinski:
In a forest of some studio somewhere, there are faces etched in the underbrush, cardboard as its leaves, wire as its branches. Also genitals and jelly combs, hair picks, hands shaped like reluctant hair picks, torsos and breasts. All of these things held in the most common of containers - cardboard. Give it a stick, propped upside down it's a soft trap for its unusual contents. Paint its insides and back, it's ribbed like a tortoise shell or some shanty's armor.

On Benjamin Heiken:
I once saw the ribs of an old ship slowly emerge during a drought that threatened to dry up the Mississippi rolling by the banks of downtown Memphis. Some artists' studios are like great rivers - not constrained by the name, never the same. Decisions like fragments, material bits like major movements, paint used like the artist was painting Twombly's actual palette, precursor to any masterpiece.

Helinski's mark is made with a china marker, or grease pencil, named for its ability to write on multiple types of glossy surfaces like ceramic, glass or metal. It makes a consistent coarseness, like a grave rubbing done from a comic book cemetery. As if instead of wax in the crayon the artist switched it to granite.

Heiken's use of jute instead of cotton canvas feels biblical, almost Old Testament. Soaked coarse Bengal stalks that carry coffee, grains, cotton itself. Often cut and unraveling with a looseness looking like some unknown animal gathers it for nightly bedding.

And then there's the pie tin, the shard that could have been, the precursor to the Frisbee, the original coffin, the industrial age's gift to the home. Helinski fills them with breasts like plasma bags, breasts like rolling pins. Some fertility yin yang for empty and full.

Heiken's Moon - the mystic moon, also moon mania, rich people in space meets the Shining's son's Apollo sweater. Conspiracy and conspirators meet face to face. A small frog decal partially buried. A streak of color reminding of something that should be buried but made center story. And a bottom abstraction squints to be a torn Tahitian sarong.

The earth is the bottom of the sky like the studio is the roof to all art at some point. Perhaps the internet too is a kiln that opens on its own ocean floor. Different detritus — broken unknowable devices, beaches of discarded denim, things that need things that are no longer made, email accounts living past their users, anything once large as evidence of the loose grasp of something yet to be understood. Life before the awkward polishing of technology.

What is the pilgrim's polish? The wave created by another's obstruction? The sadness of the fragment never knowing its full unimaginable fragile form? The coarseness of sand, the sometimes jagged shard, the beachcomber's studio home to an unrelenting process that demands unlimited examples for the word resolve.

I carry a small piece of stoneware from the Seto sea in my pocket as a worry stone. My thumb rubs its incomplete curve, once a utilitarian bowl, gridded on one side, patterned like a wave on its back. I initially misread the definition of its origin - Sometsuke. It translates to dying and decorating, and my mind still plays with how else that can be imagined.

- Benjamin Terrell, 2026

You can see more at:

@one.wall.gallery
@peterhelinski
@benjamin.t.heiken
@benjamin_terrell_painting

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12/18/2025 2 Comments

The dreamery - collaborative works by hibiki miyazaki and david joel kitcher

SELF-CARE
2025 watercolor, casein and graphite on Arches
30 x 22 inches

The Semi-Finalist would like to take a moment to celebrate two milestones taking place at Augen Gallery this month:
For starters, the gallery is presenting the collaborative work of David Joel Kitcher and Hibiki Miyazaki. This is their first time working and showing together, and they have collaborated on each piece in the exhibition. They were generous enough to send me this description of their form, process, and content:
This collaborative drawing project brings together two first-generation American artists, David Joel Kitcher and Hibiki Miyazaki. Both artists share deeply personal life experiences, including growing up with immigrant parents and navigating the challenges of trauma, neurodiversity, mental illness, and addiction within their families.
The artists created a body of work on paper that merges their distinct drawing styles while exploring common themes related to healing and cultural identity. Paper, with its tactile and delicate qualities, serves as an ideal surface for exploring vulnerability, fragility, and memory. It invites layering, erasure, and revision; processes that mirror the complexity of healing.
Throughout the project, the artists exchanged drawings back and forth, building upon each other’s work in their individual studios. They continued this exciting exchange through regular studio visits until the pieces were complete.

SCI-FI TWINS
2025 watercolor, casein and graphite on Arches
30 x 22 inches

The second milestone is in celebration of Augen’s 47 years as a gallery, as well as its planned transition into a project space over the course of 2026 and 2027. From the gallery:

"It has been 47 years since Augen Gallery opened in an 800-square foot space on S.W. Yamhill Street across from Multnomah County Library. Over these past 47 years it has been at least a six-day week and much of the time a seven-day week venture for me. The gallery has had the persistence to survive the 1980's Oregon timber recession and all the subsequent economic disruptions of the dot com bubble, the great recession of 2008, and the pandemic of 2020. But now, as I approach 77 years old, my family is encouraging me to 'dial back' my time commitment to the gallery. So as of January 2026 the gallery will move to a three-day availability schedule, Thursday - Saturday. The gallery will slow down its exhibition schedule to an exhibition every 2-1/2 to 3 months, rather than one or two exhibitions every month, and will slowly transition to become a project space. The gallery will continue to represent artists and continue to deal in major contemporary prints, but will develop a work schedule and commitment that is more appropriate for my age."

- Bob Kochs, owner of Augen Gallery in Portland, Oregon

HIGH-DOSE
2025 casein, watercolor, ink and graphite on Arches
15-1/2 x 11 inches

The Dreamery is up through December 27th, 2025. You can also see more images from the show on the gallery website.

SEASON CHANGE
2025 casein, watercolor, ink and graphite on Arches
16-3/4 x 15-1/4 inches

LONESTAR TACO
2025 casein, watercolor, ink and graphite on Arches
15-1/2 x 11 inches

THIS END UP DOWN
2025 casein, watercolor, ink and graphite on Arches
15-1/2 x 11 inches

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12/4/2024 0 Comments

Surface of mantra: new work by lesley raeside and frédéric dumoulin

Surface of Mantra opens on December 4th, 2024 at One Wall Gallery in Eugene, Oregon, with a reception on Friday, December 6th from 5:30 - 7:30 pm. Please stop by if you in the area.

One Wall Gallery (upstairs at Epic Seconds)
30 East 11th Ave. Eugene, OR 97401
Regular store hours are:
Monday - Saturday 10am - 7pm
Sunday 12 - 6

Lesley Raeside

Frédéric Dumoulin

In meditation, mantra is any repetition used to go below the surface world, but mantra can also be imagined as an invocation one employs in order to awaken to see things as they are presently, beyond the dissolution of ego. Surface is easily understood as the outer or uppermost layers of an object but can also refer to the first stages of interaction or contemplation where mystery opens to understanding. Most work by Scottish painter Lesley Raeside contains a single shape centered in the foreground of an otherwise empty composition. Repeated in a body of work Raeside's slight variations of color, tone and temperature feel oceanic, endless but also like subtle origin stories for awareness itself. Belgian painter Frédéric Dumoulin often uses repeating pattern, delicate pottery like surface qualities and compositions reminiscent of vast landscapes to imply a timelessness that is universal, abundant and epic. Dumoulin has described his work as transcriptions of Greek myths, stories that in their infinite retelling become mantra like, becoming "the dream of the waking person." Swami Satchidananda wrote of when mantra becomes habit, it "...mean(s) you have locked one end of your chain to a holy place, while the rest of the chain remains still in the outside world." If holy in the work of Raeside and Dumoulin is the untainted, something absolute, then Surface of Mantra is a chain's first and last links to a place where knowledge is lost and found and lost again.

-Benjamin Terrell

Lesley Raeside

Frédéric Dumoulin

Lesley Raeside

Surface of Mantra will open through January 31st, 2025.

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3/13/2024 0 Comments

all of the day longing: Scott beck and benjamin terrell at one wall gallery

BY BENJAMIN TERRELL

Above: A painting by Scott Beck
Below: A painting by Benjamin Terrell

All of the Day Longing

These are the days when the ice takes the trees that the fire left behind. These are also the days that if the world was a book you had been enjoying, you might now choose to put it down or turn to something streaming that promises a pleasant ending. It may feel odd then, if you are like me, to find desire as the show pony in the current barn and stable variety of fight or flight. Desire - the insatiable un-scratchable want, wheel grease of absence and unexpected byproduct of abundance. Not the wanting of things to be as they were, nostalgia is different- it is the lens that sees few facts and excludes the kind of comparison that allows depth and dimension. Longing, in contrast, blooms exclusively in our (limited) finite form and blossoms later in the further end of life's field. It is a place of paradox that offers views of everything at its most expansive in exchange for an additional poignant perspective - life is a song of appreciation that for most of us will end only partially sung.

Above: Scott Beck

For me, longing is as inexhaustible and intricate as the expressive poetry found in the micro seasons of the traditional Japanese calendar. The interpretive timetable takes twenty-four cyclical changes and splits them into seventy-two seasonal observations, each lasting about five days. A few of the ones I enjoy most are:
June 11-15 - "Rotten grass becomes fireflies",

November 22-26 - "Rainbows hide",

January 1-4 - "Wheat sprouts under snow."

Above: Benamin Terrell
Below: Scott Beck

A painting practice (and even a body of work) produces its own comparable calendar, invariably documenting the way the artist resists or invites the push and pull of life's micro movements. The paintings of mine chosen for this show are all of the same subject- water, land and a destination. My hope was that repeated inquiry, much like a mantra, could lead to a place for reverence beyond the limitations of what can be known. I believe creation concerns itself not with who or what is sincerely created, only that there is continual creation to amplify the spark of nameless awe.

Benjamin Terrell

I love Scott Beck's painting and was excited to pair my work with his. I imagined our work together would produce an enjoyable dialogue detailing yearning. Beck's work, frames of figures facing unknown arcs, often teeters between emotions and resists the context of a storyline that allows a viewer to decide how they feel about what they are invited to witness. Perfumed with possibility, the result reveals a little ledge where we rarely stand and before the jumping in, retreating or resisting, life is a vista of unanticipated dimensionality. Longing offers similar views, is also a connective place and it can function as an emotional airport that provides equal perspectives of destination and point of origin. While my work is an inversion of Beck's- I paint unpopulated external places and states of being, both of us are interested in edges and the thin spaces where knowledge dissolves into mystery. My hope is that our kindred conversation can, like two birds singing on different branches of the same tree, also be enjoyable beyond the need to know exactly why. Everything that mirrors life at most guesses what life is, and that ceremony is always initiated by the unnamable part of us that longs beyond the gravity of this form.

Above: Scott Beck
Below: Benjamin Terrell

You can see more work by Scott Beck and Benjamin Terrill...
- at One Wall Gallery
-on instagram: @scottbeckart and @benjamin_terrell_painting
- on The Semi-Finalist: an interview with Benjamin Terrell; a column about Scott Beck
- Scott Beck's 2022 show at 57W57ARTS in NY
- Benjamin Terrell's show on MePaintsMe

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12/16/2023 0 Comments

A Net for Catching Days: Sean Noonan and Alberte Tranberg at Devening Projects

by benjamin terrell

Installation view of A Net for Catching Days at Devening Projects.

Seen together, metal fixtures and painted found wood suggest building and dismantling, new technology and the obsolete, the machine and the hand, or perhaps even the beginning and end of "thingness." Painter Sean Noonan and sculptor Alberte Tranberg are poetically paired reductionists abridging alphabets into a pocketful of personal iconographies. Look - Noonan's expressive line loping like a numeral freeing itself from its assigned quantity, a cadence of cursive dissolving on top of an ostracon of cast-off timber. And look- Tranberg's repeating slim structures of steel and wax, like tactile turnstiles for riders of unknown passage, both light post and landing gear illuminating journeys of un-ornamentation. How best to tune in to this subtle and rewarding dialogue? Imagine each artist as a fluent figure skater and their chosen material (prior to their re-imagining) as the vast, untouched ice where fragility is transformed into a solid stage for surprise and wonder.

Above: Sean Noonan
Falmouth Harbour, 2O22, enamel and oil on found wood, 6 x 11 inches

Below: Sean Noonan
Talisman 2, 2O23, oil on panel, 4.5 x 9.5 inches

Noonan's gift is glyphs and a color sensibility reminiscent of old steamer trunk stickers. His are the simmering shades of the iconic, as if a totem shed tiles as a reminder that once freed from representation, a painting can bristle beyond language. But even as a Noonan hue shimmers independent of image, it also evokes different latitudes and longitudes in painting's history. There are Baselitz colors, Heilman colors, Resika colors, Munter colors, muddied and mingling with bold souls, as if someone broke into a mid-career Philip Guston and made off with the most precious part of its currency. Noonan's titles often talk of talisman, mark the time of day/night, or sometimes name a specific harbor or lake, and the latter could be an estuary for imagination or a placeholder for actual object origin. But like a body of water or a poem or a sailing vessel, the artist's titles feel as if they commemorate mainly maiden voyages. Perhaps the acknowledgement is this- after its departure an object of interest's essence is always in its continual motion.

Above: Alberte Tranberg
Stool (legs) I, II, III, 2O23, steel, patina, wax

Below: Alberte Tranberg
Fixture (light) #26, 2O21, steel, patina, wax, 32 x 3.5 x 3.5 inches

Tranberg creates inversions of the candelabra, her work wearing its wax on the bottom as if the whole earth was the flame that smolders beyond the artist's armatures. Echoed also is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, his protagonist's basement apartment pipes and the 1,369 lights that fail to illumine what is beyond the vision of the average inner flame. Both book and sculptor speak of current, conductivity and an immeasurable life force that lies beyond the limitations of the senses. And what sculpture with rounding repeated form doesn't reminisce of ribs, cribs or the graceful generosity of playground fittings? Perhaps for the artist this earth is both furnace and belly of a whale and one day some copper cough will belch us all into the real world of what can't be known. In companion, Tranberg also casts would be lamps with microphone tendencies (sometimes into impotent angles) as if to suggest speaking and seeing are both informed through the limitation of their action.

Sean Noon
Cantilever, 2O23, oil on found wood, 15 x 9 inches

A cantilever is a floating beam or gravity defying structure anchored at only one end. Noonan's painting of that title has a battleship grey ground split down the center and up one side by a green pillar on which floats an orange banner. The orange is a line from a paint filled brush that pulls up from the bottom and circles gracefully at the top before thinning in its descent. It is a discovery born from what feels like only a few decisions, yet it could be the incantation page of endless novels. A cantilever could also reference the sturdy illusion both Tranberg and Noonan harvest from problem solving alone in the same artistic orchards. Tranberg's light stands might invite the idea of being spoken into like a microphone, but they also suggest a contrary action - quiet, curious listening. Any well-made effort always contemplates its opposite. Which is to say, The Net that Catches Days also gives away to the meditation of nights. And just as the day owns the dusk, the night chaperons the dawn from unknowable darkness into everything new that takes form.

Above: Alberte Tranberg
Fixture (light) #16, 2O21, steel, patina, wax, 7O.5 x 12 x 12 inches

Below: A Net for Catching Days at Devening Projects.

You can see more:

- on Sean Noonan's instagram page: @past.the.sun
- on Alberte Tranberg's instagram page: @a.tranberg
- on Tranberg's website: www.albertetranberg.com/
- on the Devening Projects webiste: deveningprojects.com/
- on the Devening Projects instagram page: @devening_projects

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11/30/2023 1 Comment

benjamin terrell on the work of Don Olsen: What can be made with the mud

This paragraph is a mountain. Some summit of this idea may be difficult to see at first, less visible as you approach and harder still once you are on it or in it. Imagine its volume as elusive, insurmountable, or even as continuing outside its own margin. It is accurate to say a mountain is an enormous rock formation but it can also be (over an almost inconceivable amount of time) a field of rocks made small- a mountain dissolved. As you travel away to other peaks and paragraphs a similar slow dissolution might occur with these words. Or this implied mountain may fade into a distant grey, like a mountain in mist, memorable mostly between pause and emptiness.

Green Mound in a Green Land
2023, oil on canvas, 16" x 20"

This paragraph is a mound. A mound doesn't long to be a mountain, it invites ascension. As if it, too, was somewhat astonished at its vantage point (being) not merely a minor peak, maybe better understood as an uprising of urgent earth. As if a fossil festered and found itself as a silent Stupa. Its interiority as a reminder- every worthy inspiration begins as a secret concealed. In Oregon we have buttes- a flat-topped tower of rock created by erosion. Imagine, something of such potential substance has been silently revealing itself, slowly stripped away by the wind and water of 20- 30 million years. What else might be revealed one day when we, too, are merely the distant center of someone else's ascent?

PinkDottedLandscape
2023, oil on canvas, 16" x 20"

This paragraph is a goal post, a soccer net, a tent or any other man-made construction meant to conceal or temporarily house something in motion. Perhaps it is a cat's cradle, a dream catcher or a coastal labyrinth built to contain the frontier-ism of the west that ran out of room to roam. Eventually everything will return to the wind and dark water. But If energy isn't allowed its momentum, it can only turn inwards and implode. For every hundred seeds sewn; hundreds more are lost in the wind. Maybe these words also are never to take root, forever caught in this netting of prose. Perhaps these ideas can be dispersed long unknown distances like seeds carried far by beak, feather and fur.

Goal setting
2023, oil on canvas, 19" x 21"

These are not traditional landscapes, but they are awash with the tradition of landscape painting, landscape writing, even. They, like a Kesey, a Corot, or a Kirkeby, contain an unfathomable idea - the earth will continue without us. Don Olsens' paintings are stereoscopic slides where one frame is the land we thought we understood (owned, perhaps), and the other frame an indifferent infinite existing without concern for the finite. Seen together this evoke mirages, literary decoupages where we are written in and erased out of our own stories. This un-naming is also an inversion of the definition of discovery, asking: what is innate curiosity without the need to dominate what we explore? It is not a question of reverence; it is reverence's question.

These last lines are the few figures that inhabit a painting by Don Olsen. And while the lone explorers of Olsen's are often caught coming in mid-discovery, I believe they are already aware of what feels like a closing statement, "Unhappy is the land that needs a hero" (Galileo). This idea isn't included to erase the steps of The Hero's Journey, rather to remind the reader of that journey's opposite. The Grail Path is a system of inner transformation that is a necessary preface and conclusion of every rewarding expedition. Integration of both births something awe inducing into the mud and into the memory.

- Benjamin Terrell

Ramblin' Yellow
2023, oil on canvas, 14" x 18"

You can see more of Don Olsen's work:
- on his website: www.donolsen.com/
- on Instagram: 75don_olsen75

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5/28/2023 4 Comments

Parallel Lands: Benjamin Terrell and john richardson

At first glance there may be only subtle similarity noticeable between artists John Richardson (CT) and Benjamin Terrell (OR). One portrays nonobjective space with pencil only, and the other uses landscape to imply grand spaces with oil paint and stain. But both artists share a curiosity for how space and shape relate and a respect for the mystery of what cannot be named or fully articulated. The work of both is born of awe and appreciation of the way life is held together by forces fragile and ultimately unknowable.
- from the Parallel Lands press release

Terrell and Richardson will be showing work together in Parallel Lands at One Wall Gallery in Eugene, Oregon from June 1 - July 31. Below is a conversational correspondance that developed out of their mutual interest in each other's work and ideas.

Above: John Richardson, Field/Gate No. 816
2023, graphite and colored pencil on Arches Cover, 7" x 7"

Below: Benjamin Terrell, House and Cloud
2023, Oil paint and stain on wood panel

Benjamin Terrell: I began today thinking about the experience you shared with me, of being in the countryside and seeing a gate with no fence. I remembered how you mentioned that had creative significance for you, I imagined some similarity to Nietzsche and his "Turin Horse." Obviously not in comparison to the breakdown that reportedly resulted, yours more akin to an unexpected breakthrough that can occasionally happen amongst the ordinary, an occurrence or opening to some parallel world that allows us to access new perspective, unlimited compassion and greater intuitive understanding. In my practice it was a realization that the earth is the bottom of the sky, reimagining then what a landscape implies, how any picture or even poem dances around an unnamable mysterious middle. Also, reading the Christian mystic text, The Cloud of Unknowing, I liked the idea that in order to see God (truth, self) one must surrender to something great and unknowable. So, combining a spatial and spiritual apophatic relearning. Tell me more about how the gate inspired your recent work and how it corresponds to other invitations in your life.

John Richardson: Yes, there was a gate standing alone at the head of a field. From its construction, it was clear that at a previous point it served as a fence-opening to a pasture, but now the fence was gone. Still in the spring the grass was mowed by the farmer such that an implied fence line took shape, with short grass in front of the gate extended, and tall grass in what was once an enclosed space. Driving by the gate twice a day, to and from work, through four seasons over a number of years, I had an opportunity to consider the gate as analogous to some of the mysteries of life. It’s constancy revealed the changes around it. The gate was fastened with a chain and padlock, yet it was possible to walk around it as I did one day. So what was the gate keeping in? What was it keeping out? Could it be an entrance to something unknown? It’s hard to say, as the one thing I could not do was pass over that threshold. The experience of the gate was consistent in that it kept me out. The gate was still the gate, with or without the fence. Then one day the gate was gone. Without the gate, the physical memory of the fence also disappeared. The conceptual doubling of the fence, from there, to not there, was no longer a possibility. Much of what I’ve explored through art these past few years is similar to this experience. With ancient geometry and speculative architectural rendering, I’ve drawn hypothetical, visually imagined spaces. I often use the conventions of descriptive drawing, isometric views and perspectival techniques, in confounding ways that subvert their original purposes. The idiosyncrasies of documented space are emphasized, sometimes in ways that an actual space couldn’t exist in our world. There’s something that’s pointed to, and something that does the pointing. And then there’s something else altogether. Perhaps like your art, there’s an edge where the known (the earth), and an unknown (the sky) come together? Where one defines the other. The contrast between the two informs both. In this way, an unknown is necessary for a known to exist fully. Yet, how can one grasp what is unknown? A window onto it seems like a good idea to me. I see your paintings as a particular and special kind of window . . .

John Richardson, Field/Gate No. 709
2023, graphite and colored pencil on Arches Cover, 7" x 7"

BT: Paintings are almost always windows or ledges in shape, or some assumed authority to name the edges of what we see. As an object, painting makes a bid for permanence but is best when made from an awareness of our fragile impermanence. Imagining the invention of the pencil, poet Cole Swensen writes, "Beyond every window is a line where the world starts," I think the author would also agree, when we draw a line we externalize an interior impression of the world but that is only a beginning, imagery isn't for over investing, it is the first step in detaching from the boundaries of knowledge. Even the act of creatively seeing, which is the first messenger of consensus, requires a new covenant of we are to get beyond the self. What I love about your work and about drawings in general, is that unlike painting they (can) exist confidently in a state of open negotiation. I recently also read Marie Howe's poem, "the Gate" and agree with an idea it implied; that only in absence can we see. Your drawings, and your gate are composed with an architecture of intuition and I think intuition never assumes separation between experience and experiencing. Intuition knows when the elk are in the field and knows the way we too cross through, even before the grasses are bent.

JR: Intuition intrigues me. I’ve considered different sources of it; when it’s felt more in the chest, a kind of spiritual knowing, a kind of rightness. Love. When it’s lower down, around the stomach, more of a fear-based foreboding. I’m most curious when the intuition operates as a kind of realness, a kind of totality that includes all of the mind, and is not in opposition to logic but encompasses it. Can intuition be felt as a completeness that refers to states not visible, not in this reality, but just as valid or even more? This is a real challenge, to sense intuitively, to feel, and then to transmit, transmit so the experiences can be seen by others but also so it can be recognized by the self. Part of intuition may be that it exists outside of time or at least in a different relation to it. Past, present, and future can be one. I sense this quality in your painting, which is one of the reasons I find great value in looking at it. The ancient and the future collide, and there’s a small space for me in the vastness of the experience. An intuitive place where I sense that I know this land. I’ve been there. Maybe I’m there now, at least in a partial, modest way.

BT: I'm excited that our collaboration will exist in two locations at the same time- one here at One Wall Gallery, in Eugene, Oregon and the other at the University of Connecticut where you teach. We share other parallels too, you spend part of your time in the Fall Creek area of Oregon, and I live along the McKenzie river about sixteen miles away. Even though most of my time is spent in a forested area, my work isn't directly modeled after what I see, say, out on my walks. The places I hope to paint are beyond what I directly experience, in a way I imagine the landscape as the edge of what I know and what can't be known. This is a territory where our two creative destinations intersect, perhaps our imagined worlds aren't parallel but perpendicular. Or perhaps parallel is specific to this form where we find ourselves and doing the work is to find that all things are connected. I return to a particular image of yours, Field/Gate No. 816, it both announces and conceals and reminds me of the work of the Transcendental Painting Group. I think of Dane Rudhyar's writing, his idea that nothing true and vital can avoid intersecting the crystalized and the disintegrating. This reminds me of one of my paintings that you will show, "Yoshiko floats above the Japan of her youth," referencing my Mother-in-law and painted at the time of her recent passing. Spending a lot of time with her toward the end, I think I was often trying to creatively resolve or compassionately envision the unique place that her soul teetered. So flickers our daily flame, fed and blown by the same wind.

Benjamin Terrell, Untitled
2023, oil and stain on wood panel

JR: Yes, the big questions resonate with quiet force. Big questions like where are we from? We are we going? My art is an attempt, not so much to provide a definitive answer, but instead to mark the path from an unknown to a different unknown. In this way it is relational. It has points of connection to its making, to the person that made it, and to those that experience it. It exists as a small locale inside a larger constellation. It is particular. I hope that within this particularity, a meaningful energetic exchange can occur to such an extent that those distant, unseen stars beyond us are touched. While this may be an impossible goal, I find it to be a worthy one. From a small flame, to a solar flare, to the un-nameable. The imperfection that naturally emerges in the making helps ground the exploration. The imperfection provides a knowable reference that adds to the narrative. In this I’m reminded of a Barry Lopez quote, an author that you recommended to me: “Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion” (FaceBook post by Barry Lopez from Oct 30, 2011).

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12/12/2022 0 Comments

RE-CIRCULATION: THE ART OF BENJAMIN TERRELL

By John Richardson

John Richardson lives and works in Connecticut and Oregon. He teaches at the University of Connecticut. Richardson's column on the work of Benjamin Terrell coincides with Terrell's show of recent paintings at One Wall Gallery in Eugene, OR.

You can find more of John Richardson's work at johnjrichardsonart.com and on Instagram @johnjrichardsonart.

Untitled #2
Benjamin Terrell, 2022, oil and stain on wood panel

Mist is a cloud of water. Molecules of water vapor condense to form suspended droplets. The droplets move laterally, or at times seemingly upward. Not gas and not solid, but a distinct experience. A liquid, that because of its environment, floats.

Mist can occur when a moist body of warm air moves over water and then encounters cooler land. The air temperature drops and mist forms. Often happening at night, or perhaps in the early morning, mist conceals as it allows limited sight. The essential characteristics of a landscape may still be seen, but appear different, altered.

Over the centuries, mist has taken on an emblematic quality, one of blended realities, a dream state, a mysterious occurrence. Most definitely signaling a shift in perception, mist can move slowly, defying the regular expectations of the world it inhabits.

Yet mist is water, and water is a most basic element necessary for all life. Water permeates our world, our bodies, and our daily practices. From nourishment to bathing to cleaning, water is essential. The condition of water is critical. The right amount of water sustains. Too much in the wrong way, drowns. Chuang Tzu wrote, “If there is not sufficient depth, water will not float large ships. Upset a cupful into a hole in the yard, and a mustard-seed will be your boat. Try to float the cup, and it will be grounded, due to the disproportion between water and vessel.”1

Benjamin Terrell’s landscapes may at first glance seem ordinary. They are distinct and specific enough that they must be created from observation and not wholly imagined. Even so, they seem unusual in some subtle way.

With ongoing consideration, rhythmic geometries can be seen. Repeated patterns that probably don’t occur in nature, at least not very often. What do these mean? Like a map where distilled features are conveyed efficiently, the symbolic features of his painting move from being barely noticeable, to a loud whisper, to the only characteristic that matters. These can’t just be idyllic visions, can they?

Like Chuang Tzu’s water, the way in which the painting is perceived determines the quality of the experience of the seeing. And, this seems to be the point. With repeated, careful sitting, the landscapes radiate a calm, firm presence. They hint at a potential revelation that is barely there, that could become available with a little more time. Like a morning mist, the paintings shift our understanding of what may be present. Is something revealed? Concealed? Both? It’s hard to say for sure, but that’s the best reason to keep looking. Floating worlds, outside of time, or at least next to where time starts. Taking the time to see becomes the reason to look. Mist only lasts until the sun comes out. In this I’m reminded of Rumi’s advice, “Don't wait any longer. Dive in the ocean, leave and let the sea be you.”

Benjamin Terrell’s rich vision offers the viewer an invaluable opportunity to stop and to contemplate. Not through escape, but rather by immersion. For this, I am thankful.

- John Richardson, November 21, 2022

1 Chuang Tzu, A Happy Excursion

Mountain and Clouds #3
Benjamin Terrell, 2022, oil and stain on wood panel

Mountain and Clouds #2
Benjamin Terrell, 2022, oil and stain on wood panel

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9/11/2022 1 Comment

Here comes the suns

Benjamin Terrell recently wrote the press release for "Here Comes the Suns," curated by Uwe Henneken. He was also invited to exhibit work in the show, which took place at BARK Berlin Gallery in Berlin, Germany from December 10th, 2021 - January 28th, 2022 (on instagram @bark_berlin_gallery).

Benjamin Terrell
Oil stain on panel, 9" x 11"

Here Comes the Suns
Everything starts with a circle, like a pond where something emerges from where countless things have taken off and landed. A pond is nearly always round, like the sun or moon or something hung in the house to reflect us to ourselves. A lake is a mountain inverted, but a pond is canvas and cameo to where everything originated. In my neighborhood, in the country, there are two types of walks to take. One, a straight trail where you reach the end and come back past everything you first saw. The second, a circular path where everything is new until you wind up where you began.

Every painting begins as a circle, corners and edges only became important as we imagined ourselves outside or separate from what we attempted to depict. Transformation may take time, but inspiration often arrives in an instant, as unexpected as a single white bird in the center of a large empty grey pond. Ideas too, can arrive opulent and unpredictable as the path of windblown leaves mid-air, or sometimes appear fragile yet furious like the fluttering of a small bird's wings. The heart is a cart kept to collect the fruit of our artistic orchards, both compass and fragile container like a bird's nest. We too bend back resistant branches to protect and encircle what we wish to let emerge.

The cave where creativity is contained is both a circular safe container and a mysterious liminal space, part paradox and part passageway. Art is an artery and also a wounded cocoon that opens reluctantly to our nameless new thresholds. When we allow what is non-essential to sink to the bottom of our consciousness what remains is more clearly able to reflect potential transformation. Seen again, a single white bird floats now on a circle of deep blue. It would be shortsighted to see the blue as the depth of still waters, instead it is an opportunity to understand that color comes from mirroring a limitless sky.

As you read this, infinite orbits spin above us. The truth is, I am expert of nothing but humbled by everything. Maybe the sun is only a hole in the sky that the light gets through, and maybe the moon is actually the sun in a cashmere coat. But everything I know about transformation is because of birds, the bright sounds of bells and the fervent activity of brushes. In my singularity I long for collectivity, connectivity and the words to describe the contents of this room. Perhaps my hesitation to name the bends of life's roller coaster is that doing so will make me more aware of when this ride is coming to an end. A hundred birds flew from a flooded field and you and I are the few who dare to land on the elk's back.

Benjamin Terrell, 2021 (@benjamin_terrell_painting)

Curated by Uwe Henneken (@uwehenneken)

Benjamin Terrell
Oil stain on panel, 9" x 11"

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3/13/2022 1 Comment

I walk thru walls

Notes of Persistent Awe writer Benjamin Terrell was recently invited to write the press release for "I Walk Thru Walls," the online show featured on Mepaintsme from March 8 - April 18.

The Death of Benign Authority
by JJ Cromer
2021, mixed media on paper, 11" x 8.5"

"Many men drove Magic, but Magic stayed behind. Many strong men lied, they only passed through Magic and out the other side."
- Leonard Cohen

More important than whether you believe in magic is the acknowledgment that magic exists only where there is belief. If one can't imagine a bridge between the visible and the invisible, then such a chasm can never be crossed. More than just a separate world, magic is a "middle" -- much like a life that is lived between the memorable. Magic's marrow is the poetry of the unspoken, the silence of the unsayable, and the ghost in the gap between translations. Magic isn't the mountain itself but rather the realization that the mountain top forms the bottom of an unfathomable sky.

"We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe. By meaningless bulk, vastness without size, power without consequence. The stubborn iteration that is present without being felt."
- Jack Gilbert

The artist is the most qualified interpreter of the incantations of our spirit-selves. The unnamable, untethered essence of what is commonly called "spirit" is easy to catch, hard to hold but also almost impossible to portray in a painting due to the finite's inability to define the infinite. Spirit and humans were once Gods, Goddesses, and great things, but because the ones that came before us believed themselves separate, we are caught in a cycle of always relearning and reinterpreting a planet we thought we would leave. Luckily, as the body fades the spirit flourishes and likewise in painting -- when greatness is articulated something transfers from artist to object that will forever reignite in each new viewing.

Every great painting is a postcard to our future selves, but also a breath and bookmark in the middle of our eternal story that is always unfolding. Magic, too, is a necessary pause and punctuation and, in its reflectivity, it removes any illusions of separation. Endings are necessary only for the written word. "Middles" are places where both sides are realized as one -- points of connectivity contracting and expanding. These perpetual places of passage are hallways to the heart and artistic arteries from which flow everything seemingly hidden and everything genuinely revealed.

- Introduction by Benjamin Terrell

I Walk Thru Walls
March 8 - April 18th
On instagram @mepaintsme

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On the Seto Inland Sea
the Work of Peter Helinski and Benjamin Heiken at One Wall Gallery

by Benjamin Terrell

The dreamery - collaborative works by hibiki miyazaki and david joel kitcher

Surface of mantra: new work by lesley raeside and frédéric dumoulin

all of the day longing: Scott beck and benjamin terrell at one wall gallery

A Net for Catching Days: Sean Noonan and Alberte Tranberg at Devening Projects

by benjamin terrell

benjamin terrell on the work of Don Olsen: What can be made with the mud

Parallel Lands: Benjamin Terrell and john richardson

RE-CIRCULATION: THE ART OF BENJAMIN TERRELL

Here comes the suns

I walk thru walls

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On the Seto Inland Seathe Work of Peter Helinski and Benjamin Heiken at One Wall Galleryby Benjamin Terrell

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On the Seto Inland Sea
the Work of Peter Helinski and Benjamin Heiken at One Wall Gallery

by Benjamin Terrell