1939 Hawaii Watercolor Painting Suger Cane Plantation by Ben Norris (PeN)

Up for sale from a well known collector in Honolulu this 1939 Hawaii framed watercolor painting on paper that is titled Sugar Cane Plantation depicting a sugar mill on the island of Oahu in a green landscape with mountains signed and dated Ben Norris 1939. The condition is described above for more details please check the photos.

Measurements

Painting by Sight: 19.25 inches x 13.75 inches

Frame: 29 inches x 24inches

More about the artist:

among others the surrealist Max Ernst. "Max was totally charming," says Ben. "He saw with what was going on in his head more than what was really there. He gave me my first contact with surrealism and abstract art, and introduced me to the approach of interrogating materials. What are you painting? I dont know, I havent finished it yet. That's surrealism."

In 1993 Ben was honored with a retrospective show of his work in Honolulu. The show stops in the early fifties, when Ben was just beginning his explorations of abstract and surrealist techniques. "It seems to take about 50 years for works to become collectors items," he says. The paintings which have been selling of late are those which fall into the niche "California landscape painters of the 30s and 40s". Collectors are now beginning to show an interest in the niche "Americans exploring abstract painting in the 40s and 50s."

After his retirement in 1976, Ben moved to New York, and thence to Stapeley in Germantown in 1993. Around that time he came as close as he ever has to a "high- voltage" spiritual experience when a voice in a dream said , "Ben, buy a computer!" The result was a 350-page memoiran invaluable spiritual exercise, but not for publication.

Since then Ben has resumed painting. For reasons of space he has decided to stick mainly to watercolors. He is currently working on a series of a dozen or so large watercolors done from photos taken in the Manoa rain forest on Oahu. Many of them show trees being captured by vines. One has been accepted for exhibition in Springfield, Missouri.

Until very recently Ben has not had words to describe how his painting meshes with his Quakerism. He has never felt the relevance of painting on pious themes. He has long been attracted to the spiritual disciplines of Zen Buddhism, the mindfulness sutra of Hinduism, and Brother Lawrences "practice of the presence of God."

An article by Sallie McFague in the Spring 1997 issue of EarthLight (published by the Unity with Nature Committee of Pacific YM) brought the relation between art and spirituality dramatically into focus for him:

To love something is to perceive it and one can be helped to see it, really see it. . . through art. We cannot love what we do not know know in itself, for itself. Art stops, freezes, frames bits of reality and by so doing, helps us to pay attention...

Simone Weil wrote, "absolute attention is prayer." She does not say that prayer is absolute attention but that absolute attention is prayer. By paying attention to some fragment, some piece of matter, in our world, we are in fact praying.

"I live my Quakerism by paying close attention and responding to nature, looking at differences and treating them nonjudgmentally. I have only very recently found these words for what I do with painting."

This insight has helped Ben come to terms with the conflict he feels between his social leadings and the acquisitiveness, competitiveness, and conspicuous consumption which characterize the art world. Rather than fret about the conflict he can now accept it as a mystery. "I pay attention to the mystery just as I pay attention to the transparencies," says Ben.

Robert Benjamin (Ben) Norris died on September 12, 2006 , at the age of 96 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Condition: 

The painting is overall in good pre-owned condition, the paper is evenly toned throughout, the mat is stained in places, the painting was not inspected out of the frame