Edgar Allen Beem: Nick Benfey’s Peaceable Kingdom

Nick Benfey’s multi-dimensional landscapes play with time and space in thoughtful and amusing ways, providing bird’s-eye (or perhaps drone’s-eye) views of places all over New England and New York, in which more than one plane of existence can be seen simultaneously.

One of the earliest paintings in his recent exhibition, Neighborhood, at Elizabeth Moss Gallery in Falmouth is No Man’s Land from 2019. In it, Benfey has, in his words, “Frankensteined” together bits of landscapes glimpsed from a train on trips between New York City and Fairfield, Connecticut. A cemetery, a boatyard, a parking lot, a factory, houses, and cliffs seen at different times and in different places become a painterly quilt of homogenized imagery. “I like painting these little worlds,” Benfey says. “They are all at least two spaces at the same time, a physical space and a mental space.”

Nick Benfey, 33, grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a family of distinguished scholars and writers. His father, Christopher Benfey, is an Emily Dickinson authority and a professor at Mount Holyoke College. His mother, Mickey Rathbun, is an attorney who wrote a book about a member of the family who may have been the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby. His brother Thomas is a Persian scholar at the University of Tübingen. The family also counts Bauhaus artists Josef and Anni Albers among its members.

While Benfey claims no direct aesthetic influence from his family, he does credit his parents with encouraging him to pursue art. “When I was in college, I didn’t know what I wanted to major in. My parents said, ‘What about art? You’ve always loved art.’”

Benfey graduated from Bowdoin College in 2015. There, he studied with sculptor John Bisbee and painter Mark Wethli. For three years after graduation, he worked as a studio assistant to Bisbee, who is well-known for providing studio space to young artists in the Cabot Mill and for promoting his protégés in every possible way. He calls his time with Bisbee “the biggest gift of my artistic life,” noting that “John was nurturing us and nurturing a community of young artists,” and that “[h]e gave birth to a lot of young artists on the Maine art scene.” For his part, Bisbee found it “a treat and not at all a surprise to watch Nick evolve into an epic explorer of unknown realms and lands on his canvas.”

Benfey moved to New York City, where he earned his MFA at Hunter College in 2021. Painter Katherine Bradford, who divides her time between New York and Brunswick and has a studio in the Cabot Mill, attended Benfey’s thesis show when he graduated from Hunter. “I was impressed with how he’d taken a step toward making bigger, more ambitious paintings that swallowed up large crowd-filled themes of universal gatherings that hinted at some kind of historical event,” says Bradford.

Mark Wethli took one of his Bowdoin classes to New York and did a studio visit with Benfey. He was struck by how Benfey had evolved from an abstract painter into a painter of real and imagined landscapes. “I felt an immediate sense of his greater freedom,” says Wethli, “like the world of images was a much more commodious one for him than that of abstract shapes and colors. What he learned from his earlier work didn’t go away, but became incorporated into his aerial views of towns, cities, neighborhoods, power plants, cemeteries, and the ‘floating world’ in general, as the Japanese would call it.” Wethli, a precision realist who made the dramatic shift to pure abstraction, was impressed by how Benfey had kept “the abstract framework within which the imagery is presented.”

Some of Benfey’s oil on canvas landscapes, such as a distant view of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and a picture of a bend in the Connecticut River, are fairly traditional and descriptive. But even a conventional scene such as the rolling autumnal hills of Connecticut can have a fanciful origin. Stars Hollow was inspired by the opening credits of the television series Gilmore Girls.

Inner Landscape is a perfect example of simultaneity in Benfey’s work, being a painting of his grandparents’ home from both exterior and interior perspectives. “It’s a remembered physical space, a happy space from childhood,” explains the artist. “The houses in my paintings are like little spaces for daydreaming, the recollection of peaceful moments.”

The Living Night presents three landscapes in the same frame of view—a pastoral scene, a seascape, and a distant cityscape.

Being in a Backyard is a strange evocation of the psychic weight of a place, what Benfey calls an “inner constellation,” in which a circle of lights glows in the earth, echoing the warm lights of the neighborhood behind. “It’s my representation of daily experience.”

One of the major departures in Benfey’s Neighborhood exhibition is Being a Flock of Geese, Frozen River, geese in flight circumscribed in circles as a diagrammatic evocation of animal consciousness or, as Benfey puts it, “enlarging our consciousness to include consciousness beyond our own.”

Nick Benfey’s paintings have spiritual, even mystical elements that put me in mind of artists such as Louis Elshemius, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Edward Steichen. It does not surprise me that Benfey is a practicing Quaker. “I like peace and quiet and joyful moments,” says Benfey. “As a Quaker you try to cultivate peace in yourself. A painting doesn’t always have to be about the dark underbelly of life.”

Benfey invokes critic Michael Fried’s 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood” to explain art as a transformative encounter. In this seminal text on Minimalism, Fried concluded: “Presentness is grace.” “When I’m painting,” says Benfey, “I want people to be in the moment when they experience it.”

So, ultimately, the time in a Nick Benfey painting is the Eternal Now, which, of course, is the only time any of us ever have.