Ben Cohan
Biography:
Ben Cohan is a painter and a professor of Drawing, Painting, and Art History at Lake Land College in Mattoon. He received his associates from Lake Land College in Mattoon in 2002. Cohan then transferred to Millikin University in Decatur where he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2006. Following Millikin, he received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Southern Illinois University of Carbondale in 2009.
Recent work has revolved around material and compositional searching. Working out of Altoid tin pochade boxes for still life and plein air paintings has pushed me to explore quick brushwork, varied layers, and scale shifts. New abstract works have come from sketching any time I could—oftentimes on the couch after my family is asleep. As they morphed into studio pursuits on paper, a different language was developed from the compositions and new oil paintings started to emerge. The work has occasionally incongruous imagery, but shares the immediacy of investigation.
