Michael William Benton Artist Statement:

 

I had a vision 25 years ago where all matter became an infinite plane/plain/field of light; everything including me, the viewer, was fluctuating superimposed data: it was an ecstatic experience. There was no one specific method or action which brought me to this point; only a focus on personal concepts of love, kindness, wishing others well, and how my being is connected to people, places, and things near and far away. How can I describe something I cannot quite define? Visually, it was light brighter than the sun, but it did not hurt my eyes; combined with a state of energetic bliss that felt like my being was billions of ecstatic particles. The omnipresent resonance of this event trains my focus on the mysterious foundation of matter, energy configuration, local and nonlocal consciousness. It reveals to me over and over that everything is from this foundation of possibilities. It is what I see, feel, think, and am compelled to express. But the focus of my work is not the vision or the person who had it. The focus is on entanglement. Recognizing that my individuality is an entangled part of a massive/infinite whole. I create art about this perspective. I use blank pages, canvases, and screen presentations as a reflection of this infinite plane/plain/field of light perspective and add lines, shapes, colours, forms, and sounds as entangled parts of this perspective. I create art to express my own curiosities, and to capture what life is like for me in the moment the work is produced. I share it with others to communicate that I am an individual rooted in and created of the same thing as everyone and everything else. I think of many things over the course of a drawing or painting, but when I am physically applying something to a substrate, thoughts move to a flow state where concepts of correlation create images of the experience. If you consider the white of the paper, canvas, or screen as an infinite field of light, and from this field of information lines form with concept as this field expressing itself.