11/07/2024
South of Forty, West of The Pecos
Nine Lithographs of Southeastern New Mexico
The prints are all derived from street scenes in southeastern New Mexico, principally in Roswell, that I painted between 2013 and 2015. The one exception shows an abandoned general store in the small rail-crossing town of Duran, 110 miles to the northwest of Roswell.
They generally depict the vestiges of a disappearing commercial and agricultural infrastructure that grew up in the West between the end of World War II and the nineteen seventies.
When I was a boy in the nineteen sixties, these places, and similar ones across the country, formed the essential landscape of America’s postwar industrial and agricultural prosperity. Today they are either in ruins, or have been repurposed for more modern uses, some of which their former occupants might not recognize.
My aim in making pictures like this is to capture such places when they are poised somewhere between the vitality of their former use and the demise or reinvention that inevitably follows: a peaceful, evacuated moment in which they are neither one thing nor the other, but instead simply have become part of the landscape in which they still stand.
—Christopher W. Benson
1.
Roswell 1, 2024
Image: 9.875x 7.875” / 25.08 x 20 cm
2.
Roswell 2, 2024
Image: 10 x 7.25” / 25.4 x 18.41 cm
3.
Roswell 4, 2024
Image: 6.5 x 8.25” / 16.51 x 20.95 cm
4.
Roswell 5, 2024
Image: 10.5 x 5.75” / 26.67 x 14.6 cm
5.
Roswell 6, 2024
Image: 9.5 x 6.25” / 24.13 x 15.87 cm
6.
Roswell 8, 2024
Image: 7 x 8.5” / 17.78 x 21.59 cm
7.
Roswell 9, 2024
Image: 10.5 x 7” / 26.67 x 17.78 cm
8.
Roswell 11, 2024
Image: 7 x 9” / 17.78 x 22.86 cm
9.
Duran Corner, 2024
Image: 10 x 7.5” / 25.4 x 19.05 cm
Paper: 15 x 18.5” / 38.1 x 47 cm / 250 gsm
Rives BFK
10.
Christopher Benson signing Roswell 5.
12.
Christopher Benson working on monotypes.
11.
Color swatches for South of Forty, West of The Pecos.
Published and printed at Interbang Press in an edition of twelve portfolio sets with two artist’s proofs and two printer’s proofs. Ten additional sets to be distributed as individual prints.