My Favourite Things - Ben Darrah's Painting

Tangential Concern - Nov 2010

I don’t know if it was 2010 when I bought this piece by Kingston artist Ben Darrah, but that sounds about right. He had a show up at Dwell, the interior design store that used to inhabit the space on Wellington St where Something Else Records is now. I remember Jen Sutherland, the owner, calling me one evening and asking if I liked any of Ben’s other pieces as much, because someone else wanted the same one I’d picked. Well yes, I liked most everything in that exhibition, but none quite so much as this one. I apologized and stood my ground. And I’m glad I did because I’ve registered the painting’s presence most days since then. It’s a touchstone of sorts for me. An anchor.

The one deer has a liquidy blue outline and that, along with its head-down, legs splayed pose, reminds me of a dog about to shake off water. There is a tension in the animal, like a spring wound tightly. The other deer is absolutely still, ears cocked, its gaze aimed at the horizon. One so alive and the other so afraid.They occupy opposite spaces - one is inside the green-barred cage and one is free

Sometimes it is as if Ben sees the world through an old SLR viewfinder. He positions his stencilled figures - be they deer or deckchairs, cops or canoes - before wavy grids that can’t quite contain them, and can’t quite straighten themselves out. He has been exploring this idea for decades: How it is we frame the world, and what it is we choose to focus on. Another way of approaching his work, I think, is to wonder whether he has found a way to paint the background noise we all live with. 

I saw a few days ago that for an Instagram post he’d arranged fallen tree branches on green grass in a similar sort of pattern, though more askew and complicated than the one here. He’s seeing something we don’t, I thought. He’s very slowly fashioning a new language out of a few lines he found on the ground.