Joshua Benson

Hello! I am a visual and musical artist specializing in urban landscapes/skylines, stick-figure characters, and music related imagery. This takes place mostly with painting commissions on canvas and murals. Visual art and music has brought me to travel the world while exhibiting art and playing drums and percussion. Music has always been a big influence on my painting and vice-versa. I grew up in Denver, CO., drawing, drumming, and skateboarding and painting graffiti. In 2002, I earned my Bachelor’s Degree of Fine Arts in Communication Design from PRATT Institute in Brooklyn, NY. After being based in NYC for about twenty years, my family and I recently relocated to Nashville, TN., where my wife and I have recorded our debut album and my mural work is becoming known around the area. Pulling from different influences both musically and visually, my work is rooted in experiences of different cultures and art forms coming together, often joining the traditional with the modern. With a background in Graphic Design and Illustration, I would often blend the two, blurring the lines between commercial and fine art. Pulling from inspiration in nature, the city, hip hop and jazz cultures, impressionism, graffiti, fish-eye photography, African sculpture, and both eastern & western calligraphy, my visual style joins bright, expressive colors and bold brush strokes usually in a distorted perspective, often adorned with my signature-style stick figure characters. I've illustrated articles and books, painted murals, exhibited paintings, toured in the US and abroad, playing and recording with different music groups, many of whom he helped form. Playing music and designing album art has always gone hand in hand. My mother Lyn Benson (1946—2015) and I collaborated on the award-winning Christmas book, “Who Were the Magi?”, that she wrote and I illustrated. My clients include the UN, the NBA, Oneworld Magazine, Blacksmith Management, Fluent HQ, and many interior designers in NY and Nashville.