For Leigh Bennett, art is a journey, and getting there is all the fun. And if the trip can be accomplished in under an hour, so much the better.
Teaching others how to take that journey – regardless of their level of talent – is the reason she has opened the Teaching Art Studio and Gallery in Vero’s downtown arts district.
Her shop offers lessons not only in drawing and collage, but the most elemental creativity like how to doodle, or how to artfully transform yesterday’s trash into today’s home décor.
Prominently displayed in the shop are Bennett’s own paintings. Call them abstract florals, mixed media works combining watercolor, textile dyes, artists’ acrylics and latex wall paint. But you have to call her technique something far less formal.
Fun might sum it up nicely.
To create her paintings, Bennett, who was briefly a ballerina in her youth, lays a sheet of paper on the floor and literally dances around it, squirting paint from plastic squeeze bottles as she goes.
Her technique, she says, is experimental. “Sometimes one of them doesn’t work.”
When that happens, she merely collages over the parts that she doesn’t like.
“I’m all for trying new things all the time,” says Bennett.
Comparing the looping lines of pigment that delineate her posies to the accomplished naturalistic works in some of the other galleries on 14th Avenue, Bennett owns up to her limitations while maintaining a “to each her own” sense of satisfaction.
“I can’t do the beautiful coconuts and the palm trees and the waves in my paintings. My paintings are these dancing kinds of acrylic things.”
She gestures to other artworks hanging on the walls around her, tightly patterned designs she calls Zentangles, a technique trademarked by the Rhode Island couple who trained her; she now is a “certified practitioner.”
“All these are the journey of getting something done in an hour,” she says.
The method, which practitioners claim has a meditative component, involves taking the basic idea of doodling and codifying it into an activity in which students learn to draw approved patterns (according to Bennett, there are some 300.) The patterns are then combined to create complex compositions. The patterns, or “tangles,” are executed with fine-tipped black markers on paper or cardboard.
Bennett learned the structured doodling from Rick Roberts, a former Zen monk, and Maria Thomas, a calligrapher. Their company’s motto, “Anything is possible one stroke at a time,” refers to the relaxation that comes from drawing repetitive patterns.
“It’s primarily for meditation, to get rid of all your chatter, in an easy way without any frustrations,” says Bennett. “There’s no right way to do it, there’s no perspective, no north or south or east or west.”
She has taught the technique to all ages and skill levels, from a boy with ADHD to a UPS pilot. The results approach something of the claustrophobic ornamentation of a Byzantine psalter. Yet, like an old-fashioned manual typewriter, the compositions are created from a myriad of simple company-certified parts. Unlike a typewriter, however, there is no “correct” way to assemble them.
Bennett also teaches non-trademarked art techniques, including collage. Her love of flowers as a motif extends to the decorations with which she repurposes old wine and juice bottles as flower vases, rejuvenates tired silk lampshades, reforms plastic plates into colorful, art-glass inspired discs and restructures water bottles into vivid lilies and tropical foliage. A huge bouquet of the latter, displayed in a glass vase filled with rice, dominates the center of the room.
“I’ve always thought, why buy something when I can paint something for myself and put it on the wall, being the cheapskate that I am.”
As a child growing up in South Africa, Bennett did not have store-bought toys, so she learned to be playfully creative with the materials she had at hand.
“My grandmother gave me tea tray (linens) that I was always embroidering. I was always busy with my hands. I would build villages out of whatever I could find – sticks and rocks.”
Bennett’s Scottish-born mother was a ballet dancer in the 1940s. She operated three dance studios in South Africa when Bennett was a girl, and was her daughter’s first ballet teacher.
“I sort of just fell in it,” Bennett says of her ballet career. “What I wanted to do was go to art school.”
Her parents firmly discouraged that aspiration, and she focused instead on dance, winning a scholarship for two years of study at London’s Royal Ballet School when she was 16. At 18 she won a scholarship to the Stuttgart Ballet School in Germany.
“I danced both in the school and in the Stuttgart Ballet company, so I had to prove myself yet again, for the third time, to get into the company,” she says.
Bennett’s professional career lasted only five years before an injury permanently sidelined her. But during her time in the limelight, she toured the world with the Stuttgart company, and danced in leading roles. She was even partnered with Rudolf Nureyev, for two memorable performances of “Giselle.”
Dancing with Nureyev was difficult, she says, and not only because Nureyev, at five-foot-eight, stood below her majestic height of five-foot-nine-and-a-half.
“Our artistic director at Stuttgart did his own version of ‘Giselle.’ Nureyev had done the Royal Ballet version of ‘Giselle.’ So when he flew in that morning and rehearsed with us in the afternoon, he brought that version which was not our version. So we quickly had to rearrange the choreography and figure out how to make this work by the opening night, that night.”
For Bennett, ballet was not art; it was a job – a way to put food on the table.
“The whole ballet thing is tough. You are constantly being criticized and being wrong and being judged. I think that’s why now I want to find a form where you’re not being judged, you’re not being criticized. You just speak in your (own) voice, be you.”
She relocated to Toronto in 1972, where, after holding a series of odd jobs, she taught at the National Ballet of Canada and the National Ballet School.
“I did enjoy teaching, but having known what I was sending these kids into – that’s the part I didn’t enjoy. I was torn and conflicted, sending them into this kind of life that is so hard.”
A decade later she moved to the U.S. and settled in Cleveland, where she married, raised two sons and a daughter and ran a retail bead store. Now divorced, she spends part of the year in Cleveland, where her children and their families still live, but Vero Beach is her permanent home.
Bennett opened the Teaching Art Studio and Gallery almost a year ago; before that she taught some art classes at McKee Botanical Garden and the county library, and showed her jewelry creations and metal collage works with the since-closed Gallery 14 ½.
While she now enjoys her own space in which to show her work, “My real love is teaching and seeing the joy, and hopefully not the frustration,” she says.
