PAINTER OF GEOMETRIC DESIGNS : BENJAMIN SHAPES UP AS UNSELF-CONSCIOUS TYPE

“This is not my favorite kind of painting,” says Karl Benjamin, looking over his shoulder at the crisp, hard-edge canvases in his studio in Claremont. “I would rather look at paintings by Diebenkorn and DeKooning.”

Coming from an artist long celebrated for precise orchestrations of optically engaging color relationships, that may be one of the most astonishing statements in the annals of artists’ interviews.

It’s typical, however, of Benjamin’s candid conversation, and it’s probably a mark of an unself-conscious man who has painted long enough to know his mind and abilities.

Evidence of what he has wrought during the last six years is on view at the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park (through March 2), where his dynamic arrangements of geometric shapes and carefully considered colors share space with realist D. J. Hall’s probing views of the good life in Southern California.

Benjamin has found his “natural way of handling paint,” which is not the gestural approach he so admires and originally tried during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Even though his students at Pomona College and the Claremont Graduate School occasionally accuse him of being “a closet Abstract Expressionist,” he has steadfastly developed an approach to art that works for him.

In the world of business, Benjamin--along with all other artists--is probably a dreamer. But in the art sphere, he appears to be eminently practical. As graduates of Redlands University, he and his wife, Beverly, aspired to be writers and planned to pursue advanced degrees in Colorado. But when their first child was born, he took the only job that was available--a sixth-grade teaching post in Bloomington, a small town in San Bernardino County.

Told that he must have an art component in his curriculum, he approached the problem with the seriousness usually accorded to science and mathematics. The youngsters churned out drawings of palm trees and trucks, so he made two rules: “Never draw palm trees or trucks; always fill the entire sheet of paper.”

That first year of teaching elementary school in 1949-50 stretched to 29 as Benjamin quickly discovered that he loved it, and later realized that the job left him time for his own art work. With his growing reputation as a painter came employment offers from universities, but he rejected them until 1979 when he began teaching art close to home, at the Claremont Colleges.

“I didn’t know anything about art, but I got very interested in it and bought some paint,” he recalls of his early teaching. “I started to read about it and to see shows in Los Angeles, although there were only about four galleries then.”

Under the tutelage of art professor Jean Ames, Benjamin entered the Claremont Graduate School as a special student. “Jean was very patient. She knew I was older and that I was teaching,” he says. “I was a real beginner among far more experienced people and I was very difficult. I thought I knew everything.”

Benjamin took the prescribed course of “figurative painting with a Cubist overlay” (developed at the school under Millard Sheets’ influence) and worked it through various facets of Cubism, intensifying color and adding dimension. He says his relatively short evolution to his own style is “the mark of the late convert.”

People often wonder how he has continued to paint so long in the same mode, but he talks of the “infinite emotional range of expression inherent in color relationships.” His fascination with systems--numerical progressions, modular constructions and random sequences--hasn’t flagged. Besides, he has developed a positive attitude about cycling in and out of fashion: “I think it’s character-building.”

Benjamin’s art and convictions have occasionally ruffled feathers. When one of his paintings won a purchase prize award at a 1959 community art fair, city fathers refused to hang it in the civic collection. When arts advocates were predicting that Proposition 13 would kill the arts in California, he irritated his friends by writing a letter to The Times, stating that art is never “facilitated or nourished by society.” In conclusion, he wrote that “art is produced by people who go into their studio each day, mix colors that relate to the colors they mixed yesterday, and paint them on a canvas. Everything else is everything else.”

This matter-of-fact man may seem the sort of artist who considers painting a job, but the suggestion horrifies him. “A job? No. It’s the only thing I don’t have to do. I have to cut the grass, I have to pay the mortgage.”

He has never had a dry spell--the ideas keep coming despite a few “panicky” moments--but his process isn’t as systematic as it may appear. Once he has worked out a module on a small square of paper and it has stood the test of time in his studio, “I just stare at a shape until it says a color. Then I paint that and repeat the process.”

The decisions get progressively harder, as each subsequent hue affects the others, but Benjamin doesn’t pre-visualize his paintings. “If I did, I wouldn’t paint them. I’m always surprised when I take off the tape. I get from 15 to 50 paintings out of an idea, and I have three or four paintings going at one time, but when I know what I’m doing with a series, I’m finished with it.”

In his structured realm, it’s still the promise of the unknown that keeps Benjamin going. “I like these three paintings very much,” he says, waving toward a trio of finished canvases, “but that (an unfinished one) is what excites me.”