Thomas Hart Benton: Finding the Method

"Approaching Storm" by Thomas Hart Benton

"One day while reading an article on Tintoretto, I came across an account of his procedures in the creation of the famous 'Last Supper' in the Venetian church Santa Maria della Salute. For this complicated painting, Tintoretto had made a small sculpture to work out the positions of the figures and give them a logical and realistic light and shade. 

As the idea of trying my hand at historical painting persisted, it occurred to me that a similar procedure might help me with such a project. Perhaps by modelling my compositions sculpturally, as Tintoretto had done, I could supply the concrete references I appeared to need. I spent a number of months learning to make effective dioramic sculptures and to compose pictorially with clay and plastilene. In the end I developed modelling techniques which allowed me to compose rapidly and to arrive at a product which was transferable to my paintings. I could give imaginative conceptions a substantive character.

Stylistic changes began to occur in all of my work. In a short while my painting completely changed its character, and from this time on they would all possess a certain stylistic continuity. This would eventually come to affect even my studies from real life. My people and landscapes, even fruits and flowers, looked much like sculptural carvings. It had taken me eleven years to dig a method out of the artistic jungles of my time. 

It took some seven or eight more years to explore the second phase of making the method serviceable for expressing the meanings that my experiences in American life were to provide. And, before it was finished, the third phase, unhappily, would find most of the meanings, which it took so many years to formulate, would disappear with the dissolution of the world that generated them."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)