Ben
Fenton
I grew up in Dungeness, and Greatstone, and Rye, and Winchelsea Beach.
I grew up on and beside the Romney Marsh.
My father was a fisherman and I was putting to sea with him from the age of four.
I grew up with the sound of salt water dragging shingle away to some place else.
I grew up with the weight of an uninterrupted sky pressing down upon me.
I grew up in a land that had been borrowed from the deep. A land that built structures from wood, and stone, and concrete to celebrate it, and to keep from giving it back.
I am now returned to the coast of Kent and Sussex and I am painting the souvenirs of my past.
The paintings I make are my attempt to express the Manic Depression and Borderline Personality Disorder I have suffered from all of my life, through the beauty of empty spaces.
The most insidious aspect of my mental illness is the loneliness I can never shake free from. By painting the unpopulated architecture and desolate coastlines I grew up with, I try to convey a feeling of isolation, but manifested through a colour palette of vividness and light because it is imperative to understand that mental illness is not about darkness, but absence.