Reviews
Open Minded
By Trista Lutgring, Evansville Living, May/June 2020 Issue
Selected quotes:
I watched how kids draw, the spontaneity they had. I noticed they didn’t have any preconceived ideas about how things were going to look, the colors they were going to use, and the freedom with which they used lines. There were just no boundaries, or rules, and that began to intrigue me.
There’s lots of ways to make music, lots of ways to write, and this is the way I choose to draw. I like drawing this way. I like making these abstract marks and funny characters. It keeps me excited about being in the studio.
Funk Art: Notions of Finesse and Fine Art
By Thyrza Jacocks, Pelican Press, Sarasota, Florida
Funk is private and ironic...it is humble in its materials and unassuming. It is funny, corny, autobiographical, irreverent–and a threat to easy equilibrium.
Funk sprang forth in the mid-1960s with an irreverence for prevailing art doctrines and a concern for everyday life as subject, that gave it zest and great appeal. At the time its sense of familiarity, its wit and humor, and its off-beat consciousness made it an important alternative to Mainstream American Art.
And now Jeff Bender, a printmaker by training, aka "Rip," brings us an exhibition of "Flying Funk" and other interrupted characters, at the Manatee Community College Fine Art Gallery. It is completely engaging in its unaffected, unpretentious art making.
In the small etching, "Creep," a potentially playful and fancy big bug in green-striped socks (or legs!) observes a child swinging in a colored dreamworld of pink and reds while a teeny, trendy yellow bug looks on. In "Don't Make Fun of Me" two kids bedecked in gigantic flowered (collaged) hats look out at us, and we know this artist is having fun in the truly funk obsession with the absurd sense, and with images that are idiosyncratic and enticing in their style and wit.
In some of the works Bender has handmade the papers he uses and they are elegant, textural and richly colored as in "Some Nachos on 1,000 Guitars" and "Chinese Overbite." But what happens on these sophisticated surfaces is unabashedly good-humored playfulness in the Grand Funk Tradition. The child-like openness and freedom of "A Car Blowing Up," subtitled "Dad Blowing Up" created a genuine and endearing innocence that is pure fun and delight.
On many of the works Jeff Bender signs "Rip Bender," a nom-de-plume recalling William Wiley, the California genius-of-Funk and his other persona "Mr. Un-natural." Funk artists generally have a second persona or probable-self that abets the enigmatic fantasy quality of disassociated subjects, fly-away objects, and personal symbols in making it whole.
The flying constructions contain a more deliberate sense of adult-as-child in their balanced, well-designed structuralness. "Whooping Transient Bird" hangs suspended above the viewer's eye level, a pair of bosom-eyes peering quizzically through eyeglasses topped by an upright featherduster with artist's oil-brushes serving as determined rudder-like tails. They are the more elaborate of Bender's works, and the most ambitious and inventive as they border the line between daytime reality and studio-time fantasy. some "make it" on that line better than others.
On the whole Jeff Bender effortlessly manages the priorities of venerable Funk art–a caring craftsmanship and a discerning eye for textures and composition, which are the balance to the unselfconscious, childlike gesture that reveals Funk's treasured strangeness and beguiling openness and humor.
A Funky Post Script: After the invitations to this exhibit were printed, "Rip" Bender took all 500 to a second grade elementary school class to be individually hand-colored by the kids before mailing. The agility of Funk Art and its delight in inconsistency makes this a perfect fun art act by Funk Artist Bender...and the invitations are delightful!