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"The Spencer Method" by Daniel Oppenheimer Benjamin Spencer’s decorative painting falls between the borders of art and craft, of painting and architecture. His job is not to subordinate spaces to a master artistic vision, but to encounter spaces that are partially settled and then to enhance them. He’s a painter with the soul of an architect whose medium is not just the paint he applies but angles and light — the structural context of the hallways, rooms, and galleries he paints. Trained as a printmaker, but drawn into the field of decorative painting by accident and economics, Spencer works with his clients to create a living space that reflects his tastes and personality. There isn’t a Spencer look but rather a Spencer method. He works closely with his clients. He’s precise. He’s loosely historical. He’s subtle. He’s efficient. And he uses stencils — because they allow him to work quickly, and because he finds the results of stenciling beautiful and somehow natural. “Stenciling makes the most of light and space in a room while creating a harmony of color, tone and form,” he writes in one of his three brochures he’s produced to advertise and explain his work. “…Stenciling appeals to our innate love of repetition, symmetry and color.” Spencer’s most high-profile job, so far, has also been his most stripped-down. He was commissioned to decorate the galleries for “The French Portrait: Revolution to Restoration,” an exhibition at the Smith College Museum of Art that ran through December 2005. For it, he cut out one stencil that referred back to the classical style to which neo-classical style of that period of French painting referred. He then painted that stencil, over and over again, in Athenian blue and white, around the borders of the galleries. The result isn’t historically accurate but rather historically flavored; it’s neo-neo-classical, and it frames the artwork without imposing on it. More personal and elaborate, but similarly processed, is the work Spencer does in people’s homes. When he met with ..., for instance, to determine what he was to do with the guest room of her house in Northampton, the two of them focused their discussion on … [her] work as a bookbinder and as an assistant in the Rare Book Room in the Smith College Library. She’s both a maker of books and a lover of the history of books, and it made sense, if she was to commission a decorative painter to lend a distinctive touch to her home, to draw on those interests. The result of the … [this] discussion is a simple, elegant white room wreathed in blue designs that look, to the untrained eye, like colonial-style decorations appropriate to the house’s general aesthetic. To the eye trained in the history of bookmaking, however, the designs reveal themselves as variations on particular patterns, called Granjon Arabesques, which ornamented 16th-century manuscripts. The room is thus a marriage of the New England tradition of tasteful austerity and bibliophilic tradition of esoterica. For … a couple from Lenox who were renovating their house to double as a bed and breakfast during the Tanglewood season, Spencer responded to their request for broadly Asian-style designs with a series of stencils inspired by Japanese and Chinese brush paintings and woodprints. Over the span of two weeks, Spencer iterated and re-iterated bamboo talks and leaves, cherry blossoms and branches, and the occasional bird into variations up and down and across the two stories of the home’s public spaces. Spencer’s art … exhibits a visible continuity across media and project. He’s drawn to the forms which underlie nature, the shapes whose repetition gives hints that the universe, for all its unpredictability and diversity, has some sort of order to it. |
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