Biography:

Ben Georgia has been a professional full-time artist since 1983 and maintains a 3000 sq. ft. studio in New Jersey and a winter studio in Florida. He has exhibited in many galleries in the US and eastern Canada. His paintings are in numerous private and corporate collections such as Pfizer, Ricoh, Castrol and Shering-Plough.

Artist's Statement

"Like Picasso, the paintings begin with reality and end in art! With my deep understanding of abstract art, my observations on Nature and man-made objects are transmuted and meta- morphosed in my paintings from reality to expressive color-relationships and non-objective forms.

Painting is forming with color. In my paintings, color is liberated from its traditional descriptive role and the color development channels the form. There is psychological meaning in the color, creating art that expresses an emotional and subjective experience throught the purely optical sensation of painterly brushwork and hues.

For me, painting is magic, a revelation, in the process of what arrives on the blank surface of the canvas through the distillation of color and the physical act of painting. It translates the experience of place, time and emotion, remembered and actual, the process of painting, the energy and agony of the creative act.

I want the sensuousness and surface interest of the painting to lead the viewer to a deeper dimension where painting becomes poetry.

I was born close to the waterfront in the multiethnic, urban, industrial Jersey City, NJ, in 1941. I got a B.A. from Rutgers University in 1965 and a M.A. in 1977. I studied Painting and Art History at New York University and Columbia, where I worked under Theodore Stamos, friend and colleague of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Baziotes and the others who made up the New York School of the Abstract Expressionists. I followed Stamos to the Art Students' League of New York."

Ben Georgia