-Devin Bender was Born in Long Beach, CA, and is currently based in the Pacific Northwest and Los Angeles. They have exhibited in various spaces across the West Coast. Painting in Bender’s process is like a form of poetry with strong graffiti, musical, mystic, and cartoon cultural roots. Their paintings are like immersive portals, derived from memories of urban and natural landscapes--to be engaged in as realms of inexplicable feeling and internal experience conjured through color and mark-making. Bender’s work serves as a visual diary and functions as advocacy for neurodivergent creativity.

My artwork is a visual method of abstraction used to express a spectrum of fundamental emotions from mystification to bewilderment. I am largely influenced by memories of the Pacific Northwest and southern West Coast landscapes, which I distill and transform to evoke feelings of the sublime. Surfing has sustained me during my life on the coast, and the parallels between surfing and painting are undeniable to me. They both give me that same feeling, where it all just happens intuitively and naturally, like paddling for a wave and I’m riding utterly enveloped, not sure where it’s going exactly but knowing right where to go. Yet instead of the sea painting is like surfing the nets of consciousness. The interplay of chaos and cosmos is inherent in my work and acts as a reflection of emotive energy-bursts and gestural brush-work, while maintaining a balanced depth of composition.  In my work, I seek to push beyond the boundaries of language, invoke realms of experience, and express ineffability.