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Tim Benson was born in London in 1978. After attending school in Highgate and Hendon where he showed considerable promise as a draughtsman he undertook an art foundation course at Middlesex University in 1996. In 1998 he earned a place on the fine art degree course at the prestigious Glasgow School of Art. In 1999 he decided to transfer his degree to London and embarked on his second year at The Byam Shaw School of Art in North London. After gaining his fine art honours in June 2001 Tim's potential was immediately spotted by a leading London gallery and his work was included in an exhibition of landscape paintings in September of that year. From there he did not look back and has subsequently shown with some of London's finest galleries.

During the 8 years since he left art school Tim has evolved as a painter, refining both his technique and the interpretation of his subject. In recent years his attention has fallen on the flatlands of East Anglia, in particular Norfolk and Suffolk. It is no coincidence that this is where both Constable and Seago made some of their most powerful works, as the combination of impossibly vast skies and abrupt verticals in a sometimes overwhelmingly horizontal landscape creates views that have a stark beauty found nowhere else. Tim, like those great artists before him, is not interested in the minutiae of a landscape, preferring instead to render the subject with loose, expressive brush strokes and a muted palette that reflects the earthy hues of the scenes he paints.

Tim is interested in all forms of painting and he treats his portraits and life studies with the same freedom as he does his landscapes. He comments "whether I am painting a landscape, portrait or still life the fundamentals are the same. I try to break the subject down into form, colour, light and dark. It is tempting and natural to make assumptions about a subject, for example we are all hard wired to recognise human faces so it is very tempting to paint what we think we know rather than what is in front of us. So an eye is not an eye, it is a series of shapes and colours just as a tree on the horizon is only a fleck of paint with no leaves or trunk to speak of."

E-mail: info@hayhillgallery.com