Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Benjamin Weaver. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Benjamin, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

Learning to paint can come in unexpected forms, and often what might seem like an obstacle turns out helping to learn the craft in meaningful ways. My education comes from learning valuable skills during my employment in the fine art field, and applying them in my independent work until I was able to transition into full time painting. Part of my success in this process was fully engaging in the work at hand not knowing how it might apply to my artwork.

For example, in my first job at a stained glass studio I was exposed to color, design, and scale that would have been hard to access on my own so early in my career. I was able to learn how to enlarge work, and pair color in unexpected ways. In my second job at a fine art foundry I learned about structure, form, negative space, production, and developed a high level of dexterity. Some of my most difficult painting I have done has been as a mold maker laminating rubber on sculpture to make molds. It gave me an understanding of surface tension and paint flow. Because it was done three dimensionally, when it came time to paint in two dimensions it was that much easier to accomplish.

In my own practice, learning multiple mediums helped tremendously. Painting watercolor was especially helpful in learning clean painting techniques. Painting in oil taught me how to enhance color in layers. Using these same techniques in acrylics has allowed me to paint in ways my contemporaries might not consider.

The most essential skill is a healthy self criticism. If you can’t learn from your own work it is hard to advance. You gain a deeper understanding of your art as a whole if you are conscious of what works, and doesn’t work in your own practice. The greatest obstacle is time, but if you can’t consciously understand what you like and don’t like about your own work because of time restraints, feeling rushed, it would be better to wait until you can get in the right mindset.

Benjamin, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I got into the industry because I like to produce beautiful objects. I was fortunate to work on many large scale public works in sculpture and stained glass. Now I can provide paintings at scale. I understand what works in the home, and what proportions are needed for larger rooms and galleries. I am proud of the consistency of my work across multiple series of paintings. I have been able to develop artwork that explore spatial and color relationships. I have been able to develop an overall structure and language to my work that makes it easy to understand these concepts in multiple formats.

Have you ever had to pivot?

It is important that my work can communicate the content in a universal manner. When I first came out of college I was painting and sculpting in an abstract figurative style. I produced a significant body of work, enough that the underlying concepts should have been obvious. However, when my audience would see the work they would concentrate on the style and couldn’t get to the substance of the work. I wanted to emphasize the relationships between the figures who were set in unrecognizable minimal landscapes, but the viewer couldn’t get past the color and forms of the figures. So, I moved onto a nonobjective geometrical style of painting that purely emphasized the relationships between forms.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I think the modern journey as a creative is hard to understand from the outside. There are many tasks that the artist needs to fulfill in order to be successful. There is an emphasis currently to be an artist first, and a publicist second. The promotional aspect makes it hard for people to understand how much work goes into the creation itself. There is a private almost monastic life that goes on behind the scenes in order to get enough work created.

The public view of the work is a small sliver of what goes on behind the scenes. There are a lot of jobs for the individual creator that never see the light of day, and the creative is always thinking about what to do in the short term in hopes of achieving in the long term. What you see in a show today might have been created last year, still considered by the public to be the most recent work, but the artist has already moved onto the next series of work. The work never stops, and sometimes the artist is promoting work that was done in the past because it is still new to the public.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.benjaminfweaver.com
• Instagram: @benjaminfweaver
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1161042453
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminfweaver/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMYLP-MkDw5Hfv6xubdoJnw