M. Benjamin Herndon’s work explores the perceptual and emotional possibilities of light, color, and materiality, bringing together scientific precision and spiritual inquiry. Working across linen, granite, wood, and paper, he uses metal oxide pigments, graphite, and other carefully formulated materials to create surfaces that shift subtly with light and with the viewer’s movement. Though rooted in abstraction, Herndon’s work is grounded in lived experience—a flash of brightness across a waterfall, the faint glow of dawn, or the quiet tonal shifts found in music and in the natural world. These sensations do not function as subjects to be depicted, but as catalysts that begin each new work.
Earlier in his practice, Herndon focused on darkness and the emergence of light from within it. His later incorporation of interference pigments—microscopic metal oxides that cause color to shift with angle and illumination—revealed a duality that had long guided his work: the idea that a single material can contain its opposite. This discovery became a material expression of unity, allowing the work to “pass through a prism,” as he writes, and reemerge with the full spectrum of light. His process is meticulous and experimental, involving the mixing of dry pigments in exacting ratios, the layering and burnishing of surfaces by hand, and the construction of carefully carved supports that function as both object and image.
Herndon’s practice is shaped by qualities of stillness and deep attention. He considers quiet not only as a conceptual framework but as a method—an approach that resists the noise of contemporary visual culture. He works from a state of focused listening, allowing sound, light, and material to converge in meditative equilibrium. Through this approach, his works invite viewers to slow their own perception, attune to subtle changes, and enter a space of calm, contemplative awareness.
Herndon grew up in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California and is now based in Providence, Rhode Island, where he works in a studio housed in an historic textile mill. He received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His work has been exhibited internationally, and he has held residencies at the Tamarind Institute for Fine Art Lithography, the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Marble House Project, and others.