Benjamin Lai is a New York-based painter and craftsman.
He creates experiential textures for people who are big on bespoke finishes and amazing surroundings.
Experiential is defined as: relating to, derived from, or providing experience.
Experiential things can be seen, touched, and verified. Benjamin’s process of making a texture experiential is a concoction of three basic ideals; experimentation, experience and spritual action. These core concepts are the basic elements predicated in his work.
The ocean is spirituality. It’s so easy to stand on a beach and become mesmerised by watching the waves.
“The idea becomes a machine that makes the art” - Sol LeWitt
Spiritual
We are all linked to the sea physically, cognitively, and emotionally. It would be dishonest to say that being on my surfboard isn’t always on my mind. The ocean is my muse. I'm inspired by its movement, textures and luminosity. The ocean is the guiding form that has helped me create a formal language from which I paint from.
Experience
"Virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions," Aristotle said.
A successful project starts with having a solid foundation. This strong infrastructure is the culmination of experience, creativity, knowledge and good habits. More than three decades of being hands-on has given me quite a bit of know-how. But honing my BD skills as the lead artisan and project manager for my last company was most instrumental in helping me form my own job philosophies. Experience, though, is a forever learning process so with every new project and/or client brings a different experiential journey. And this allows the long streak of experience to continue to pile on.
Experimentation
I do not carry a line of ready-made samples or products. I feel it’s best that everything is made to order because every project is usually unique in some way. Most of my work happens through experimentation. And what I mean by that is every bespoke service carries different parameters that requires new mixtures. Therefore, every new project is a hidden experiment. Every project is treated individually even if I’m trying to replicate a repeat finish. You know the saying… You can’t ride the same wave twice.