“Three Questions”

Ben Styer

December 3, 2025

Volume 2
Issue 16

Gideon’s Bakery: What do you like about painting?

Ben Styer: I like how painting makes me lose track of time, and I like the way it seems to connect me to an outside world of people I'll never meet. I like the practice of painting because it comes with permission to be free and unafraid. Painting is a weird way of trying to be present within yourself, trying to follow the questions you have, find out what’s deep in that head of yours! it can be both an act of loving and interrogating yourself or the world.

GB: This is a powerful and deeply resonant answer. I love how you describe painting as a kind of disappearing act of time, a dive into an “outside world of people I’ll never meet,” and simultaneously an intimate dialogue with yourself. Your phrase “permission to be free and unafraid” is especially strong and captures the paradoxical mix of vulnerability and courage that painting invites. You describe painting as a way of becoming present with yourself — a space where freedom, fearlessness, and self-interrogation all coexist. In your own work, which often navigates the uncanny, the playful, and the psychologically charged, how do those internal states shape what actually appears on the canvas? Do you feel the painting leads you deeper into those questions, or does it sometimes answer them for you in ways you don’t expect?

BS: Finished paintings do answer me in ways I wouldn't expect all the time, and new experiences with them can happen at any time. I often only understand the edges around the meaning of what I'm making or why I'm making it, until later maybe. sometimes i can be very decisive that This Thing goes There, etc., but there’s no chance of explaining why. it’s a matter of feeling like I know, or submitting to not knowing. The activity is intuition-based, and about trust.

it leads to a difficult question about honesty in painting. Sometimes paintings are ultimately about escape or avoidance; sometimes they are trying to reconcile a part of you that’s hard to stare directly at. you can misdirect yourself in painting and realize after…the painful part of the practice is that it has to evolve through your own self doubt and criticism, even loathing…your ongoing dissatisfaction with the product, you…which finds a way to reemerge always.

There's a balance every time between what’s being fully articulated in a painting and what space is being left there as an open field of possibility. I try not to force connections or meanings into shapes, but rather keep their functions loose. I present things together that I'm urged to believe connect in wordless ways, and trust that they lead to a form of honesty I can't otherwise explain.

Paintings can be from a place of peace or joy or dissonance or fear, and what they convey contains but doesn’t solve those states of being. experiencing them and knowing what they mean are separate things. In a way, sensing your own vantage is all you have as an artist.

GB: When your paintings eventually meet an audience, do you think of the viewer as stepping into the same emotional terrain you inhabited while making the work, or do you imagine each person establishing their own distinct vantage point? What are your hopes for the viewer?

BS: I have an always-changing idea of what my paintings do for people. much of the time i can’t know. I see that for me, painting has been functionally based around finding peace, so that’s my clue. I've heard a few times that viewers see lost loved ones in my figures, and that makes sense to me.

In recent years I've veered heavy into personal reference, piling esoteric, sometimes vague ‘emotional terrain’—as you call it—into the work with a loose attitude. I've learned through doing this: as I get more miscellaneous AND more ultra-specific in my imagery, it sets up an automatic mystery for the viewer and also for me, which I find curious. some viewers will see my intimate objects in unforeseen, foreign ways.

As the subject matter is so varied and inward-facing, it becomes about something other than knowing all the footnotes, and more toward an instinctual understanding of all the parts working together at once, and what their exchange brings to light.

As viewers we visit these personal landscapes of others and when they resonate deeply, even in unfamiliar terrain, they’re our own landscapes. Within that ownership there’s so much unknown to contend with, but on some level it knows you, and you know it. Finding this experience is special and mysterious. It tells us our secrets look the same.

Ben Styer (b. 1990 Boston, MA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received his BFA from the University of Massachusetts in 2015 and has had solo presentations at SHRINE (New York, NY) and Moskowitz Bayse (Los Angeles, CA). Styer was included in a group presentation at Fortnight Institute (New York, NY), and his work is a part of the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, TX.

Ben Styer, Little Music Box Stories, at Shrine (NYC), installation shot.
(Image courtesy Shrine and the artist)

Random Rainbow, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 16 in.
(image courtesy Shrine and the artist)

Bakery Hours, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 16 in.
(Image courtesty Shrine and the artist)

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