THURSDAY JANUARY 9, 2003  

     Artist Robert Benjamin, who paints landscapes, was adjusting to alterations in the local landscape this week.

     Now living in New Mexico, the former Alliance resident attended Liberty and State Street schools, which were torn down last year. In fact, the rubble of the latter was still visible when Benjamin went by the former site of the middle school. Benjamin was in town to donate one of his original works to Rodman Public Library. The large pastel depicts a bluff nine miles west of Grants, N.M.

     “The Navajos call it ‘the haystack’ because it resembles one,” said Benjamin. He had previously donated four lithographs of his work to the library.

     According to Benjamin’s biography, he produced his first oil painting at the age of 10. It was an image of a burning castle. Was it Alliance’s Glamorgan Castle which experienced a fire in the 1940s?

     The artist laughed and shook his head. It was merely one of the wild fancies that boys of that age are prone to.

      Born in Martins Ferry, he moved to Alliance as an infant. Benjamin attended State Street Middle School where he started an art club in the seventh grade, and where art teacher Elmer Day “was a great inspiration to me. I remember him as a pleasant man who walked down the halls whistling. He showed respect to the kids, whom he called ‘people.’ He didn’t impose his will on his students, but shared the experience with them.”

     Artist Robert Benjamin, a former Alliance resident, poses with his original pastel of a bluff in New Mexico where he currently lives. Benjamin was in Alliance this week to donate the work to Rodman Public Library.
Review Photo/Kyle Lanzer 
Artist plans to document area scenes

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     Another inspiration was Benjamin’s late mother, Marjorie. “She dabbled in art, and that’s where I got my love of it.” His father, William, nicknamed “Red,” still lives in Alliance. After graduating from Alliance High School in 1969, Benjamin worked in a steel mill but soon went to Pittsburgh and the Ivy School of Professional Art. Following a year of classes he headed for Albuquerque in 1971.

     After several different, art-related jobs, Benjamin began to work in lithography, a form of print-making. And after studying casting techniques, he opened, in 1980, his own foundry, Southwest Bronze.

    In 1995, Benjamin began to work with Les Hawks, a landscape painter. “We’d go out on road trips together and paint outdoors,” said Benjamin in a recent interview for New Mexico Magazine. “He’s the one who opened up my eyes to see how to paint. He exposed me to a different way of painting.” Three years later, he was traveling across the state with another artist, Rebecca Lowe, to create the images for a calendar of New Mexico scenes.

     His work is found in the Smithsonian Institution National Collection of Fine Art, the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts and the Navajo Tribal Museum in Window Rock, 
Ariz. Benjamin said that he paints both on location and in the studio using photos he has taken. The desert heat of the Southwest drives him indoors to work.

     But he is not strictly a regional artist. “I work in other states,” he said, indicating an interest in recording his impressions of the Alliance area. “I want to do some paintings of Silver Park and area farms. And I want to take a look at Glamorgan Castle.”  

     One special interest is house portraits. “I like doing them. They’re my bread and butter. They represent the love of families who have kept them up.” Persons who are interested in having their homes documented by an artist’s brush can contact Benjamin at. ** And his art is sold locally by Barb’s Frames and Florals on East Main Street.

He has two daughters in Albuquerque who are also involved in the arts. Ashley is heading for Santa Monica, Calif. to study computer animation. Dana has been a photographer for several years.

  Benjamin is no longer involved with creations in bronze. “I do only oils, acrylics and pastels now,” he said. But a long-time friend, Dennis R. Christy, who traveled with him to Alliance, is a sculptor who works in stone.

     “We’ve been friends for decades,” said Benjamin. “We met at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Christy is a Saginaw-Chippewa who hails from Mt. Pleasant, Mich.

     “We don’t work together,” said Benjamin. “He does his art and I do mine. But we talk about it all the time. It’s a way of life for us.”

* this is an old phone number that is not in service - not sure if the frame shop is still in business