First Friday Art Walk – April 2016

Stop by NexLynx Gallery of Arts, Friday April 1st from 5pm to 8pm, to view the beautiful photography by Charles Benton during our First Friday Art Walk.

NexLynx is Downtown Topeka’s premier gallery stop on the First Friday Art Walk since November 2010 displaying hundreds of original photographs, paintings, carvings and sculptures from dozens of local and regional artists.

Charles Benton, a native Kansan who loves to travel, became interested in photography after vacationing with his wife in the Southwest.  He didn’t have any “Arizona Highways” quality pictures, but was pleased with his pictures. This is when he discovered photography would be his artistic outlet, starting to take more than vacation pictures.

He has been especially influenced by Canadian photographer; Freeman Patterson’s books, in particular, Photography and the Art of Seeing. Patterson wrote what he called “relaxed attentiveness”. Basically, this means honing observation skills to “see” things in a different way.

Most of Charles’ photos in this exhibit have some aspect of nature as their subject. His hope is for people to see his love of creation and perhaps be moved to look at the world around them with a new eye while experiencing the sheer beauty (and sometimes strangeness) of this world we live in.  His growing edge as a photographer is to find abstractions in both the natural and the human created world.