Art and flowers have been in artist Loren DiBenedetto’s life since a young age. Her parents were artistic and dabbled in painting, while her own journey in art began to take a more serious shape during high school. She also grew up working in her aunt’s flower shop and found a creative outlet in the abundance of blooms. The two passions merged as her professional art career developed.
Five Acorns, oil, 30 x 40"“I struggled sometimes with what I wanted to paint,” DiBenedetto recalls. “But they say paint what you know. That made so much sense to me, so I started painting flowers. That’s when I really knew I could have a career; when I found the passion for what I wanted to paint.”
In the earlier years, DiBenedetto painted large florals and then expanded to other natural objects. “I always felt like I could find inspiration in anything, and that’s why I like still life,” she says. “I went from flowers into fruits and things like that because I wanted to catch the moment in time. These things will never look the way they look [at that moment] again. Everything evolves and changes, and what attracts me to still life is being able to capture the moment of light in a certain way.”
Tomatoes in Green Bowl, oilSimplicity has been a uniting factor of her compositions, as it helps create space for the objects, light and shadows to play. Often DiBenedetto will set up her still lifes outside—preferring early morning or late afternoon when shadows are longer—and take photographs of what she wants to paint. This allows her to explore the subject from a variety of angles and atmospheres.
Vase of Scabiosa, for example, has a seemingly equal focus on both the object and its elongated shadow. Tomatoes in a Green Bowl is a still life from above that, she says, lets the viewer appreciate the color of the bowl and allows them to see the stems and leaves of the tomatoes. A traditional still life view would obscure some of these elements, even the gentle folds and ripples of the cloth in the painting. Another work, Five Acorns, was inspired by a tree branch that had fallen during a storm. “The simplest things inspire me, and the acorns were still on it,” she says, “It was such a gift. It was just incredible and that’s what inspired me.”
Pomegranates, oil, 18 x 24"
Vase of Scabiosa, oil, 24 x 18"
DiBenedetto is represented by Anderson Fine Art Gallery in St. Simmons Island, Georgia; Sage Creek Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and at Art Cellar Gallery in Banner Elk, North Carolina, where she will have a solo show in August. Her painting Pomegranates was juried into American Women Artists’ upcoming exhibition Breaking Through: The Rise of American Women Artists on view March 5 through May 29 at Customs House Museum & Cultural Center in Clarksville, Tennessee. —
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