Heather Bentz

Heather Bentz is the assistant dean in the College of Arts and Architecture at Montana State University and currently teaches a drawing class for the School of Art. She received her BFA from Pennsylvania State University and her MFA from Montana State. She is married to Curt Freese, has one daughter, Erica, and has resided in Bozeman since 1991.

LINE, COLOR, STRUCTURE

The imagery in my work is based on abstractions of ordinary sounds, scenes, objects, and experiences around me. I find inspiration in familiar bird songs, hanging laundry on lines, flat tissue paper patterns and blasts of train whistles over long distances. The shared similarity among these disparate sources is my connection to them over time—inspired by the present yet anchored in my past.

The agricultural landscape of rural Pennsylvania was the backdrop of my childhood where order and effort were evident in the acres of carefully organized orchards, tree farms and rows of planted corn. Necessity taught me to see possibilities in what others had discarded. I learned how to sew at an early age, garnering an appreciation for transforming two-dimensional planning into three-dimensional objects. These early experiences and impressions are rooted in my core and emerge in my aesthetic.

The agricultural landscape of rural Pennsylvania was the backdrop of my childhood where order and effort were evident in the acres of carefully organized orchards, tree farms and rows of planted corn. Necessity taught me to see possibilities in what others had discarded. I learned how to sew at an early age, garnering an appreciation for transforming two-dimensional planning into three-dimensional objects. These early experiences and impressions are rooted in my core and emerge in my aesthetic.

My process of working allows me to explore and reveal my content. I work without a plan or destination making intuitive and informed decisions, first creating chaos then responding with structure and order. I mark time and track effort in rows of ticks and slashes—a monotonous yet comforting recording of my inner energy. I recycle, cut up and rearrange parts. I sand, paint over, make marks, reconfigure and collage to add to the history of the surface. Color accentuates my vision. Raw, exposed edges speak to the informal and unrefined elements of my aesthetic.

My intent is to document my interpretation of the complex world around me—the flux, the movement, the transition of both the mundane and ordinary as well as the complex and exciting. The manipulated surface and recycling of work captures and reflects the layers of activity of that consistently moving target.

Heather Bentz

Fall 2009

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Artists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.