LATELY THE ARTIST CORY BENNETT has been rethinking what success as an artist looks like. He used to think it was about money. It’s a simple, and fairly common, equation: make art + sell art for enough money to pay the bills = success.
“But actually, that’s not it,” Cory said.
He remembers being elated when he first started selling his paintings for $500 apiece off the walls of a little restaurant near where he worked in his 20s in Southern California. As he started filling more walls, picking up new clients and networking contacts in the art world, he came to the realization that you can take the same piece, put a frame on it and put it in the right place, and all of a sudden you can add a zero to the price tag.
In a short amount of time, his pieces of stenciled pop art over abstract multimedia backgrounds started showing around the country and the world. And they were selling for thousands.
As he started to reach the other side of the equal sign in the success-as-an-artist equation, he began to realize that money wasn’t what the definition of success looked like for him.
“People who have inspired me have used their voices to do something other than their god-given talent,” the North Kitsap-by-way-of-So-Cal-by-way-of-Las Vegas Neo-Pop artist said. “And I feel like that’s a big part of the creative world now. Because there are so many artists. There’s so many talented people in our area and in the greater area. You’ve gotta take it that one step further. What is your message? How are you bettering your community? And what are those things that I can do?”
He smiles big at the thought.
Cory carries an infectious and intentional positive energy.
He’s got those happy painter vibes as he bounced around in his painters’ clothes at last month’s opening party for the ‘Positive Frequencies’ exhibit his work is featured in through February at the Northwest African American Museum in Seattle. The show features four artists highlighting the “unifying power of music, transcending cultural and societal boundaries.”
And it is worth the trip.
Cory’s work occupies an entire half the gallery. But beyond galleries, he is discovering one of the things he can do to better the community through his art is to invite people into the actual experience of making art. Making art, no matter how simple, has been shown through mental health studies to decrease stress and anxiety.
“It’s something that I do every day, something I use as therapy,” Cory said. “But then, when I share that with someone who doesn’t do it every day, and I see them light up, it’s like, ‘Ok, this really is therapy,’ and it can change perspectives.”
Over the past decade-plus, under his signature C.Bennett, Cory’s work has shown locally, nationally and internationally. He’s got some impressive stuff on his resume including speaking at the United States Capitol in 2022.
At the invite of local congressman Derek Kilmer, Cory gave a keynote address to the winners of the national high school Congressional Art Competition.
But the first project he brings up over coffee as we talk at his home studio in North Kitsap is a local community mural project he, and partner Josh Fisher of McClellan Design architectural studio, spearheaded in 2018.
For that project–a mural on the side of a public works building across from the Poulsbo library–they were commissioned to survey the community about what they’d like to see in local multi-generational parks, distill that data into a design, then invite the public to take part in the painting. They had around 100 participants, Cory said, and that’s when the overall picture of how he can use his voice as an artist to do something bigger for the community started to come together in his mind. “It’s not my mural, it’s the community’s” he mused. “It belongs to that kid who can say, ‘Come check what I did!’”
Cory had done a similar project inside the Vibe Coworks building in Poulsbo in 2017 where he created a giant ‘Vibe’ stencil and invited members of the co-working space to join in painting on the wall before removing the stencil to reveal the finished work. In his first featured exhibit at the Bainbridge Island Art Museum in 2021-22, Cory invited viewers to put stickers on his paintings in what he imagines was the first time there was a space in that museum where people were not only allowed but encouraged to touch and collaborate with the art.
Last fall, Cory was commissioned for another mural project in his home town of Las Vegas. The multi-mural project was sponsored by the Life Is Beautiful Music & Art Festival at a public park near a middle school, just down the road from where Cory grew up. While it wasn’t explicitly organized as a community project like the Poulsbo mural had been, organically by the end of the week, Cory had some 20 middle schoolers out there painting with him. When they asked how and what they should be doing, he responded simply ‘have fun’ and passed out stencils and spray paint cans. He’d thought at the end of the project he’d have to go back over the work and clean it up, but, to his surprise, no touch-ups were needed.
“That’s the beauty of art,” he said. “There is no right way to do it. It’s different for everybody. It’s that idea that you can do something that nobody else can do, right? Even if it’s just a scribble. Nobody else can scribble the way you scribble. I try to make people realize that you are special, whether you know it or not, just because of your individuality.”
Cory didn’t find his way into the art world until college. When he was in high school, he said he’d planned to become an architect. While working on his prerequisites in college, he took a left turn into the creative art field.
“I realized I didn’t want to be drawing inside the lines, I wanted to be outside of the lines,” he said. “I have this approach where it’s just good feeling. There’s this intention that there is no wrong. There’s just being. Just be present and go with what’s natural and what feels right and then from there, anything is possible.”
After graduating from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo in 2009, Cory moved to the Naples Island neighborhood of Long Beach, Ca. He tended bar at a Mediterranean lounge there while working on his art. He threw a low-key art show in his backyard which led to local restaurants showcasing his work, which then led to a studio space with cheap rent where he would develop his layered style of painting, setting pop art images atop abstract and multimedia backgrounds. During that time, he also hooked up with a Beverly Hills artists agency which brought visibility to his work nationally and internationally.
He moved to Kitsap about a decade ago, where his wife, Nicole, is from.
He still shows his work at that Mediterranean lounge where he worked in Long Beach, along with four or five permanent residencies and various other shows around the country. But recently, he has been focused on community works around the Pacific Northwest. He’s currently working on an 8-foot-by-10-foot lenticular painting to be featured in the renovation of the century-old Mount Vernon High School through the Washington State Arts Commission. He and his partner, Josh Fisher, have also applied to the now-closed call to artists for the public art involved with the City of Bremerton’s Quincy Square project.
The Quincy Square artists have yet to be announced but that project is officially slated to begin this spring. // BILLMAN
CHECK OUT ART BY C.BENNETT w/ Eric Salisbury, Myron Curry and Samuel Blackwell in ‘Positive Frequencies’ up thru February, with the annual King Day celebration from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Jan. 15, at the Northwest African American Museum, Seattle. More at naamnw.org and at artbycbennett.com
