{ Amy Bennett }

At one and the same time, I want to say these are interesting because they aren't your typical nature landscapes, and that they're interesting precisely in how they are. Bennett's approach seems to be not to paint scenes in order to depict the landscape or scene 'itself', but to depict that landscape as if in miniature, as if she were painting an idealized scale-model. All of which gives her work a sense of "anterealism" (as the opposite of surrealism). Whereas surrealism goes 'beyond' or 'above' reality, her work seems to stop just short of it, to stand before it without fully entering into it (or, rather, entering fully into a reality that is only a re-presentation of reality). So she does paint typical scenery in the sense that her paintings are of scenes that we feel we (could) have seen depicted beforehand (in model form), and she doesn't paint the typical in that she focuses her efforts on being true to the model rather than what the model is of. . . . Or, at least, that's one way of looking at these; and accurate or not, I still think Bennett's work is worth the reflection.


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