Benjamin Britton

Benjamin Britton is a painter who was born in Palo Alto, CA in 1976, and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY in 1999 and his MFA in painting from UCLA in 2008. His work has been shown primarily in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Atlanta. His paintings are in the collections of the High Museum in Atlanta, GA, the Ballinglen Museum of Fine Art, and the West Collection in Oaks, PA. Britton’s work has been reviewed in Art in America and the LA Times, among others, and included in New American Paintings magazine. Britton has had solo shows at Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Santa Monica, and Frederieke Taylor Gallery in New York. He is a recipient of the Chiaro Award in painting and an Artist-in-Residence awardee at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA, a recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle, Ireland, and a J.B. Blunk Residency from the Lucid Art Foundation in Inverness, CA. He teaches painting at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA.

"More often than not, it seems to me that life calls for the senseless wonder of pursuing something as likely to fail so exquisitely as a painting might. The threshold for adventure is there, at least. The practice of painting gathers what it wants to it, and some things can't help but help themselves to painting.  When it's working out, painting is a unique agreement on the circumstances of beauty and meaning which is rarely simple. It is frequently and actually messy. Painting is a way to constitute the experience of looking in an ecstatic sense by projecting one's body into a field of illusion, color, and space."  --Benjamin Britton