Blue skies, lush greens and luminous reflections pervade Ben Berns’s calm but carefully detailed landscapes. But early in his career, his work was more conceptual and at times three-dimensional.
Berns was born in Ginnejen, the Netherlands, and demonstrated a precocious interest in painting at age eight. He was a school dropout at fourteen and went to work for a printing concern, followed by a stint studying lithography in Amsterdam. He spent two years in the army—a Dutch requirement—and then went to Paris where he immersed himself in the local art scene for five years.
In 1963 Berns emigrated to the United States and took a job teaching lithography in New York at Pratt Graphic Art Center, an affiliate of the Pratt Institute with a space dedicated specifically to printmaking. Robert Motherwell and Jim Dine were associated with the center. Berns’s position there lasted about a year, at which point he earned his way by renovating lofts in Soho and selling Japanese prints. His own work was experimental, at times incorporating light bulbs and canvas. A leitmotif throughout his career was his preoccupation with light, evident also in his landscape paintings. In addition, Berns undertook outdoor projects which involved beams of light reflecting the topography.
From 1970 until 1974 and again between 1976 and 1982 Berns was an art instructor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In his second year he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the same year that Sam Gilliam received his. By this time Berns had shifted to precisely painted depictions of the countryside, influenced by his Carolinian surroundings. Typically, human beings are absent, and rarely is there a trace of their activity. He has explained how his landscapes are a “section of the universe, and that’s why I don’t feel I need to put people, or too many houses, or roads in my painting. The presence of humanity is there—there's nothing you can do about it.”
Following his departure from Greensboro he split his time between Cheverly, Maryland, and New York. In addition to his oil paintings he created meticulous drawings on site. About his penchant for detail, he proclaimed: “I do not paint detail for detail’s sake. That's just copying. I do the detail because I want to give the painting its own reality.” He retired to Fairfax, Virginia, where he remained until his death.