February 23rd 2025 | DAF

Pink Trance | Trudy Benson, 2023

I found this piece in a category on Artsy titled “warm-toned artworks,” and if you know me, you know I love a warm-tone. From far away, this work appears to be a loosely done checkered pattern overlayed with child-like scribbles and geometric lines that create a series of overlapping squares. When you look closer, you can see that checkered patterned is colored by rings of tightly drawn lines. In the next layer, an array of light pink squares cover areas of the board and reintroduce the underlying colored line-work by placing corresponding spray-painted scribbled blobs. Finally, the art is topped off with these pink and orange lines that nearly jump off the page. The lines seem to be far above the rest of the paintings contents despite everything existing on the same canvas. These dimensional lines follow the same idea of creating squares and checkered pattern but doesn’t seem to acknowledge any preconceived patterns generated from the previous layers of the piece.

It truly is a “Pink Trance.” It appears fairly simple at first, but the more you look at it, the more you are entranced by the details and relationships between the different sections and techniques within the art.