Silver Creek Fine Art Gallery & Custom Framing, owned by El Cajon artist Carlos Castrejon, is holding an exhibition of San Diego-based visionary artist Ty Bennett’s 2024 “Fire of the Soul” Art Exhibition from through May 2. SC Gallery is in the heart of downtown El Cajon at 120 E Main St. There will be an Opening reception on April 4 from 5-8 p.m.
Ty Bennett is a self-taught artist whose transformative, intuitive-surrealist paintings explore themes of consciousness, psychic transformation, and the apocalypse. His work, marked by vivid colors, abstraction, and figurative imagery, offers a profound reflection on the unconscious mind and spiritual awakening.
Wendy Morris, well known for her work with St. Madeliene Sophie’s Center and Sofie’s gallery has taken on representing Bennett in procuring him local exhibitions to display his new works. Morris said she met Bennett at ArtWalk in 1989. After going to the exhibition of his work, and purchasing a piece of his artwork, Morris said by chance, she met the artist for the first time in the elevator as she was leaving. Bennett was 19 years old at that time.
“We have been friends, and I have purchased his art all these years,” she said. “I have always thought that he has had a distinctive style that I enjoyed. A self-taught visionary, I really was moved by his art.”
Born in Long Beach, Bennett’s family inherited property in Colorado but moved back to San Diego after the property burned down in a forest fire, losing everything, said Morris.
“He lost all his artwork. A lifetime of artwork, rare books, other collections of art he had from other artists that he liked,” she said.
Morris said Bennett stopped painting, but she heard from him when he began painting again, and that is when she decided to start promoting his work, working to get his new works into local and national exhibitions, trying to get more interest in his work.
“I really feel that there is a niche market for his artwork,” she said.
Morris said Bennett is a dedicated artist, working 12 to 16 hours painting every day.
“His style has continued to be very consistent in its imagery and imagination,” she said. “This show is all paintings from 2024.”
Morris said Bennett is a mixed-medium artist.
“He uses oil, acrylic, house paint, and then he paints on wood, canvas, cardboard,” she said. “He told me when I met him at 19, that he and his mom would drive around San Diego at night looking for pieces of wood that had been discarded.”
Bennett is a dedicated painter working spontaneously every day while exploring themes of psychic transformation, vibration, black humor, and the evolution of consciousness in his art. The density of imagery is purposely exaggerated for a maximum effect, offering a spiritual awaking that he hopes can help to change the world. As an esoteric philosopher, poet, and visionary he is influenced by Gurdjieff, an Armenian mystic, James Joyce, and Pavel Filonov, a Russian avant-garde painter, art theorist, and poet. Through his art, Bennett wishes to lead people towards art and creativity, hard work, consciousness and away from mass conformity, narcissism, and the tendency to sleepwalk through life by not paying attention to what’s important. Bennett understands art as an influential tool for change, transformation, and is a powerful mode of expression for what we are and who we wish to be.
