Traditional Tools

All of my work is completed using tools that I can grasp in my hand.  This includes hand saws, miter boxes, and jig saws.  I primarily use acrylic paints, ink pens of all sizes, mechanical pencils, and dead trees (wood/paper).  Cameras and scanners are the only digital tools that I have and they are specifically and exclusively used only for sharing my work on social networking sites.

May the Force be with you....always.

I was born in 1978 and named after Obi Wan "Ben" Kenobi.  Needless to say, I was raised on all things STAR WARS.  I started drawing as a child, mostly Star Wars ships and characters.  My mother was a draftsman for a phone company so there was never a shortage of pens, pencils, papers, rulers, and erasers around the household.  I am also the son of a carpenter and grew up playing on job sites and in wood shops.

The Making of "Icarus"

I am extremely proud of this particular piece.  It took almost nine months to complete.  Most of that time was spent procrastinating and getting distracted by other projects.  The wood was bought at Lowes and it measures 24" x 24" which has been one of my larger works.

I had wanted to do my own depiction of Icarus for a while.  I'm fascinated with his story.  Heartbreakingly EPIC.

As a completed work, I wanted to overlap an illustration (blending realism with elements of design) on top of the "painted wood grain" technique while utilizing both positive and negative space.  You are looking at the back of Icarus as he is flying into the sun.  His head is hanging so far forward that it is out of picture.  This is intentionally exaggerated because adding hair or even the top of his head wouldn't look quite right.  I just couldn't get it.  I had the same issue with the legs.  The natural wood grain patterns seemed to be dripping from his torso....so I decided to enhance that idea.  In the end, I deemed "head" and "legs" to be irrelevant. 

The skin tones and sun rays (yellow) were drawn with colored pencil.  I seem to be able to produce highlights/shading techniques best with colored pencils and graphites.  Colored pencils also allow the natural wood grains to show through better than a solid coat of paint.  Colored pencil was only used on skin and the yellow that you see above in the sun.  All lines are drawn with mechanical pencil using HB 0.7 graphite.  Once everything was colored, two generous coats of polyurethane were sprayed on.  Finally, ALL lines were traced again to achieve bolder lines.

Painting the wood grains was an extremely time consuming process because all four colors required at least two coats each.  The lightest orange peach color (not pictured above) required three and sometimes four coats to get solid. 

This is the end result.  Completed in early January 2012.  I really wanted the natural wood grains to be an important part of the work.  The patterns are organically based.  This piece represents a balance of my current technical strengths.

"Armed With Teeth"

This piece, "Armed With Teeth" is one of my personal favorites.  Its another piece of work that just kind of happened. 

I picked this board up off the ground from a job site back in 2010, if you look closely you can still see a small "hazard orange" chalk line where someone marked it.  That was an unusable blemish in my opinion so I set the board aside for a while and eventually used it to test some paint spatter techniques.  I tested the white paint spray first and then the red paint...which explains some mixing of the two.  This board was a piece of unusable garbage after the paint dried so I cast it aside......in my head.  

And then something happened. 

I just happened to LOOK at the board in a certain way.  It was positioned as above in the photo.  The far right side of the spatterness, specifically the two sections that protrude from the rest....appeared to me like a pointy nose and pointy chin.  Kind of like a (side profile) witch's features?  I started to see it forming, in my head, so I quickly grabbed a pencil and lined out the nose and chin.  Everything fell into place rather quickly after that. 

These are the original pencil lines.  I drew him with a flapping forked tongue at first.  Then as soon as I took this picture....I realized it was lame. 

I removed the lame flappy forked tongue and added more blood.  !!!BLOOD!!! \m/.  This was achieved by globbing large amounts of red paint (in the desired shape) and allowing it to dry completely.  Next, I would spray a light coat of polyurethane on top.  Once dry, I would repeat the process until satisfied.  I really wanted to bring out more texture.  White dry brushing was used to help with highlights (of textured mouth blood).  Additional red spattering was used to achieve desired positioning. 

This is the end result.  It is.....armed with teeth.
Acrylic paint, pencil, and 14 megatons worth of polyurethane.  The piece remains unframed for now.  It feels more raw like that. 

"Worship the Octorus"

For a few years, Ive had this image in my head of an octopus with wooly mammoth tusks.  I had never seen it in the real world and, quite frankly, its a fucking rad idea.  The ceramic head was a gift a few years back.  It was white with a diagram of a brain on the cranial portion.  The wooden shelf-like object (behind the head) was purchased at a local thrift store. 

The concept of the "Octorus" is completely fictional.  But in that fictional universe, the Octorus ruled the World Ocean and was worshiped by the peoples of the Other Land.  It was said to have rows of sharp teeth, eight tentacles, and a pair of long curved tusks.

The Grand Shaman of this particular tribe had a special head-dress constructed in the likeness of the Octorus creature.  The Octorus was perceived as a "God" and its image was cast into the night sky as a constellation.

The design of the head-dress was drawn (with graphite) onto the black painted surface.  This process was extremely tedious.  The "mirror imaged" design needed to be as close to perfect as possible. 

Yes it has peyote cactus as eyes.

"Worship the Octorus" by BAO 2011

acrylic / ink / graphite / polyurethane

on Ceramic and Wood

"Apex Predators" from Planet Ish

"Extrasolar Botanical Study : Planet Ish : Apex Predators" was the third piece I completed in 2011.  The wood panel is one inch thick and is 11" x 37" not including the frame.  It took about a month for me to finish. 
Since I did not have a projector at the time, I had to use the old school method of graphite rubbed on tracing paper. 

The design/illustration is a vertical mirror image of itself.  The flower head and vines at the top portion of the panel match exactly to the design and shape of the spikey root system at the bottom portion.  I chose to break the entire piece into smaller sections for better accuracy. 

Once the design was transfered onto the wood panel, I used ink (Sharpie) to trace all outlines and then proceeded to paint within the lines.

The wood panel was sanded and stained Golden Oak.  Approximately three coats of polyurethane were applied on top of the painted/stained surface.   The frame was purchased as crown molding/trim....which was hand-cut, assembled, and stained (Ebony) by myself.

This "apex predator" killer plant was observed laying its long skinny vines on the bottom of lakes....and twitching the tips of the vine like a small gyrating worm....as a fish would strike (thinking its a meal) the plant's vine would quickly snatch the fish out of the water by hooking through and out the gills. 

It had also been observed grabbing birds out of the air, most often during mid-flight.  On some occasions the powerful and long vines would wrap so tightly around the neck of a bird that it would cause the head to detach from the body.

This apex predator was obviously carnivorous and all hunted prey were placed into the mighty jaws below.

"Apex Predators" is part of a developing series of paintings on various wood panels that all revolve around a "fictional" theme of a mythical planet called Ish.

Benjamin Andrews Oliver 2011

"Mating Dance" from Planet Ish

This was the second piece I had completed in 2011.  I found this wood in a woodshop and it was cut into
the shape that you see above.  It kind of resembles a skateboard.  I stained it with a red mahogany and used acrylic paint for color and ink (from a Sharpie) for the outlines.

The full name of the title is "Extrasolar Botanical Study : Planet Ish : Mating Dance" and it is intentionally long because this piece is part of a series of paintings revolving around a mythical planet called "Ish" where the dominant species is highly evolved plants.  The title can be shortened to "Mating Dance."

This particular scene shows how two common plants on Planet Ish can "fuse" together during a mating ritual.