Life and Work with Maya Benko

Today we’d like to introduce you to Maya Benko.

Maya, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I have always loved to paint since I was a child dipping my hands into pots of color and smearing them across the kitchen floor. But when a strong female role model and friend of mine passed away, I painted a special piece for her young daughter to remind her that no matter where she went in life, her mother would always go with her. The painting combined watercolor with an e.e. cummings poem, and became known afterwards as “E. Elephant”. From then on out, whenever I showed this particular piece, I had strong reactions from clients: people sobbing the instant they looked at the painting, couples coming back years later to tell me that they had been trying to conceive a child and had been successful after purchasing the elephant, and many more unbelievable stories. And so, “E. Elephant” started me back on the journey of painting and storytelling, and of healing as well.

Has it been a smooth road?
Making it through your early twenties is like riding butt naked on a bucking bronco, inside of a doorless jeep, going 90 down the highway with both blinkers on, as you try not to get thigh burns. It’s a tough time. In efforts to find who I am and where I belong, I have found out exactly who I am not and where I cannot exist. At 21, I moved to Spain to study literature and Arabic architecture. I loved every minute of the hot, dusty country of southern Spain (and even enjoyed my experiences in Morocco, where I got a new layer of skin following a sacred bath, a bad case of Giardia and was almost kidnapped by being rolled up in an artisan rug). At 23, I moved to the dense jungle of Costa Rica, where I taught English, swam with crocodiles, and lived on an active volcano that blew two miles into the air in front of my plane the day I was forced to move back to Colorado. I’ve returned countless times to the Big Island of Hawaii, where I spent my childhood, trying to find the fearless girl who rode bareback on wild horses and ran barefoot across cooled lava.

The truth is, I never stopped being that fearless little girl. Life just found a way to make me forget it.

So, always remember that the strength and courage and fire that you have inside of you never goes out. That flame keeps burning when you need it most and will be your guiding light and source of strength throughout your whole life. Always remember that the hard experiences you face in life aren’t true darkness; they only throw more gasoline on your flame.

We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
My motto for art is, “Paint what you feel, not what you see.” I am by no means a technical artist. Most of the time, I can’t sit still for longer than 20 minutes at a time, and if nothing gets painted in that window, nothing gets painted at all.

But I know I am great at feeling emotions, so I channel experiences, sadness, love, anger, disappointment, or joy into each of my pieces for an authentically chaotic moment. What I feel is what you see and what you get.

Who have you been inspired by?
My mom and younger sister are huge sources of inspiration and emotion in my life. They are some of the strongest feminists I know and are constantly shaping my perspective as I move forward in the world. My core group of girlfriends are always around to get a little rebellious, and the high school students I teach show me what it is to be a strong woman everyday, inside and outside of the classroom.

I do fantasize someday about having cocktails with some of my favorite women (specifically Jane Fonda, Coretta Scott King, Maya Angelou and Sylvia Plath) and think of my “dream team” as one might think of Jesus, asking, “What would these badass women do?”

Contact Info:

• Website: http://mayabenkoart.weebly.com/
• Email: benko.maya7@gmail.com
• Instagram: @mayabenkoart
• Other: Old art available at: https://www.etsy.com/nz/shop/MayaBenkoArt?ref=search_shop_redirect

Image Credit:
Maya Benko

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