Strawberry artist depicts portraits of luck through lottery scratchers
Strawberry artist Ben Benet at his studio in Sausalito, where he displays his lottery themed artwork that explores the ideas of risk and chance. (Leo Leung / For The Ark)
Strawberry artist Ben Benet found inspiration for one of his recent projects in his experiences playing lottery scratchers.
When those scratchers turned out to be losers, he says, he would experience feelings of disappointment, thinking “Oh, man, I’m terrible. I’ll never, I’ll never win.”
He realized those same thoughts were universal to feelings of loss, and he started to process those thoughts while working on a series of portrait collages using losing lottery scratchers.
“The more I started understanding that feeling — I mean, like, ‘OK, I didn’t win. Move on.’ — the more I was able to kind of experience the next moment and not be caught up in a loss,” says Benet, 35.
Benet has a studio in Sausalito’s Industrial Center Building and will be one of the artists participating in the studio’s biannual Artists at Work event March 22, when the public can go and see studio members in action creating their art.
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