Gallery – Ben Allen
Ben Allen, 27, was born and raised in Brighton, the son of an artistically inclined travel agent and equally creative bank project manager from whom he thinks he inherited his talents. However, he describes the defining event of his life as discovering his dad’s Led Zeppelin albums, aged 12. He only studied art to GCSE level and it wasn’t until 2000, after returning from a three month jaunt in Mexico, that he threw himself wholeheartedly into painting. Before that he’d tried everything from bar work to running a skate-shop and even a day on the dustbin lorries (“The Job Centre told me I’d be working with an environmental team”). Nowadays the commissions come thick and fast. “I painted a 40ft stairwell over three floors for Virgin management in their Notting Hill office.” he recalls, “That was full on. I was supposed to just deliver it but ended up installing it with one other guy. It was painted in my studio on eight different panels and then transported up there. The boards had been measured up wrong so it took us ten hours to get it to fit, not to mention having to build the scaffolding tower first.” His last completed commission, creating seven huge paintings on cowhides for the new Hoxton Hotel in London, was apparently even larger.
Apart from numerous exhibitions in London and Brighton galleries such as APART, Art Asylum and Studio 113, Ben’s work has been featured in GQ, Elle Décor and others. Asked about the more extreme reactions to his art Ben describes “one guy who bought a few big pieces told me he uses them in his prayers – I’m not religious but I think that’s pretty damn cool.” He ponders further, “Recently a couple bought a big piece from me, they removed a fireplace from their house to get it to fit – that’s probably the most extreme architectural response I’ve had.” Ben Allen has an exhibition at Microzine in Liverpool from November 30th.
[‘80 GRAFFITI REVIVAL]
“This was one of the first pieces I did using fabric and paint. I found this crazy leopard print material and had it stashed. When I started painting the woman it just clicked, so I cut her template out of the leopard material and surrounded her face, gluing it to the canvas. It created a really ‘80s hip-hop effect and remains one of my favourite pieces.”
[COWGIRL HEAVEN]
“This canvas is 2.5 X 1.8 metres and was great fun to paint. I spent most of it up a precarious ladder in my last studio. The actual cowgirl is larger than the average human which makes her really striking. I placed her over a background with no worldly dimension as she lives in a floating fantasy of beauty and mischievousness”
[END OF AN ERA]
“So you’re getting the idea that I like to paint feminine subject matter! This canvas marked the end of creating so much work influenced by imagery I was creating on the computer. Brain, hand, paint brush to canvas, this is what I’m aiming for more these days.”
[HEADPHONES ONE]
[The first big canvas I painted was this. An image inspired by my love of photographs from the Mark Gabor book of early pin ups and my love of music. This piece was blackboard paint onto an emulsion canvas. It’s such a simple image but really strong, the simplicity makes me revisit it a lot for future inspiration on how to keep it real.”
[JAPAN]
“A few years ago I got into joining lots of different textured materials together. I then stretched them over a canvas frame and really heavily emulsioned it, like 5 times. It takes ages to dry. I leave at least an inch of the materials join protruding from the canvas which creates clearly sectioned panels. It’s awkward to paint over but the textures and separation are really unique.”
[PIN STRIPE POP]
“The girl in this painting has featured in three or four different pieces. She just embodies the retro feel perfectly for me. This was the last canvas I did using her and I’d just started getting into stripes. They can be a pain to paint – straight lines and me a bit of a perfectionist. I think this piece creates a world of layers as if she is travelling through beams of disco light.”
[POP PISTOL]
“This was a natural progression from a basic piece I did just featuring the girl. Painting this kind of detail on canvas can be really time-consuming and I like to experiment and move quite quickly through imagery. So when I started silk-screening, which allows for the detail to be created much less painlessly and much more accurately, she came to life.”
[RODEO RAINBOWS]
“I really like the playfulness of this piece. It incorporates my interest in multi-layering images, allowing the backgrounds to become the insides of the foreground details. Does that make sense?”
[TOKYO IN BLOOM]
“This was a piece I created last year when I was imagining going to Tokyo. I haven’t been yet but this is my visual fantasy of what it is like there when everything is springing to life. I think it also captures a bit of a digital feel representing their obsession with technology. The contrast in Japanese culture of nature and machine is like nowhere else on earth. I love Japanese animation and comic books also. If I had money to burn I would probably have loads of the collectable figures and robots too.”
