Zoe Benbow: Woodland Walk, paintings

This autumn Zoe returns to Dartington to present a solo exhibition of her paintings, taking the subject of ‘trees’ as a starting point.

In recent times, when Covid restrictions have meant we have all had to stay closer to home, for city folk like Zoe the tree became a symbol of an accessible wilderness on our doorstep.

Often the paintings reference landscapes as remembered in fleeting moments, or recorded in photographs and drawings. By exploring the same motifs and images over a long period of time and through the medium of paint, the canvases do not aim to be a representation of a specific time and place, but rather to imply the sense of a landscape, to evoke a landscape of the mind’s eye.

In this way, Zoe alludes to the modernist tradition of abstraction, where the painting, exists between itself and its audience – forever in the present – creating a liminal space where we, the onlooker, become ‘the figure in the landscape’ and – like Mary Poppins jumping through the chalk drawing – hopefully we are visually able to enter the painting with a little reverie and magic.

Zoe Benbow is a studio based independent artist with many years’ professional experience and lives in Hackney with her teenage son.

zoebenbow.co.uk