Lois Bender

Biography

Lois, a longtime New Yorker, combines her background in art direction and graphic design with personal expression in drawing, watercolor, photography, and printmaking to produce a fresh synthesis of style. Her commercial brand GardenSpiritsNY Designs grew out of her Retail Gift Industry experience and her love of nature. Bender’s art practice explores nature themes in gardens, etc. at residencies in France and The Hamptons, NY, as well as the Women’s Studio Workshop. With a B.A. from Hunter College, NY, and an MFA from Boston University, she teaches art and watercolor techniques in the Metro NY area. She is an Art Professor at Essex County College in Newark, NJ who lives and works in Manhattan and is an urban/garden sketcher who celebrates nature in all its poetic and ephemeral serendipity.

Artist statement

“Pools of Reflections” Contemplate “Plant, Pond, Poem”

My Paintings and Prints offer fresh mixes of abstraction and design, both digital and brush. Water reflections have always inspired me. I’m an artist who enjoys seeing the complexities in nature, specifically how water reflections on surfaces and in the depths shift into abstraction-distorting realities. The pond is like a mirror and eye connecting the sky to the earth. Mine is a cosmic and holistic view of how humans connect through art, culture, and emotion to the earth and universe. I like the place where reality and abstraction meet and all the liberties an artist can take. For me, the pond is a playground where art and nature intermix in mesmerizing aquatic feats of theatrical imagery. I’m in my element in my The Pond Series/water themes!

My “Pools of Reflections” series of works on paper is imagined as aquatic tableaux of “plant, pond, poem,” a subject inspiring me to many dreams and reveries. Captivated by the dramatic light and settings, my inner/outer eye experiences vibrant grasses graphically at play in the rhythmic water’s ebb and flow, magically emerging and disappearing like gelatin in rippling reflections! I love the abundant variety of visuals of this “seeing” pond, flowing or still, a virtual eye mirroring plants above and below and the sky beyond. Water’s fluid transparency from its depths to glassy surfaces reveals a lucidity found in reveries, lucid dreams, and the feeling of time suspended in the trance of the creative process.

Ponds: waters, textures, and sounds entice me to musings, to imagine visual poetry, to dive in to reveal more of the layerings of the pond’s complex pentimenti passages. Hidden marks emerge from the paper, meeting on the surface in a fusion of textures and traces of time, merging as hybrids in figuration and abstraction. In pastel, watercolor, printmaking, and photography, my work expresses a desire for Nature and the Human to correspond/echo/mirror/co-mingle in a poetic synthesis of “plant, pond, poem” in a profound prayer for universal harmony and joy. As with my other subjects of nature, My tableaux of botanical life in pond waters unfold in many variations of nature’s reflecting pools, perhaps serving as springboards to our soul-searching and self-reflection seeking deeper personal meanings.

—Lois Bender

loisbender@loisbender.com