If Kirsten Benfield's voyage as an artist had a beginning, it was most likely on an actual voyage undertaken when she was 4. She and her parents traveled overland from their home in Auckland, New Zealand, through Australia, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran before eventually reaching England, where, at age 5, Ms. Benfield started school.
Traveling by trains, planes, buses, and hitchhiking, "We were in places where Europeans weren't usually going," she recalled during a conversation at her house in Springs. "What I remember was color and flavor. Color was a big one, because you just remember places for their magnitude of colors."
After two years, they returned to New Zealand. While the future painter did well in art in high school, she had more compelling interests. "I did modeling and television work when I was a teenager," she said. "And I did some chef training in my teens, but then I decided to go to the front of the house and not stay in the kitchen. Because I was modeling, and it was not good for the hands."
The front of the house is where she's remained since the mid-1990s, not in New Zealand, but at Nick and Toni's in East Hampton, where she is the dining room manager.
"To me, food is an art form," Ms. Benfield said. "With the restaurant, it's creating a mood, it's the environment, it's the music, it's an aspect of artistic creation, and Toni [Ross] has brought that fantastic artwork there, and an incredible aesthetic. The place has good feng shui."
Her post at the front desk at Nick and Toni's found expression in the serenity of many of her waterscapes of rocks and jetties.
"The funny thing is," she said, "when I was doing all of those rocks, I couldn’t understand why I was fixated on them, but then I realized that at the restaurant I am at the door, and for me it was seas of people coming and going in summers and winters, and then you get the kids of the people coming. So the rocks, the jetties, were me: I’m there, and everything else was just coming and going. I tend to realize things afterwards."
Ms. Benfield came to New York in 1992 with a couple of friends, but soon left for the East End because "it was a little more like New Zealand." She spent several years in Southampton before moving to Wainscott after starting at Nick and Toni's. She has been in Springs for 10 years.
Photography became a pastime after she settled here. "The photography was about focus and composition, training my eye to see." Her subjects were landscapes, waterscapes, and foliage. "I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how waves work, and how water works, and the tension between sand and water when it makes those little patterns."
She took her first art class in the late '90s with Miriam Dougenis at Guild Hall. "It was a watercolor class. She was all about still lifes. We would go outside and sketch. It was also about getting involved with the community."
After another artist suggested she try oil painting, she went to Golden Eagle Art Supply in East Hampton and stocked up. She still has her first oil painting, "Daniels Hole 1," a richly expressionistic semi-abstract landscape of a place in Wainscott that she drove past every day.
"In the summer I'd go by that and I would think I just wanted to sit and look at it and stay with it. I think part of the process for me has been getting these impressions, and following what comes from them."
She cited a remark of Picasso's: "The movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself."
"That hits the nail on the head," Ms. Benfield said. "You get this impression and it filters in. I visited Hawaii in the early two-thousands, and I was painting Hawaii for four years. It just kicked, the colors, the cliffs."
Around 2010, looking for classes, she returned to Golden Eagle, where she studied painting with Janet Jennings and Barbara Thomas and encaustic with Martha Stotsky. 'You do all these different ways of making art, and they all feed each other. I'm really a graduate of Golden Eagle."
For a while she was a member of a watercolor group that studied with Ms. Jennings and continued after she stopped teaching. Known as Water+Color+Works, it includes Nancy Brody, Barbara Dilorenzo, Laurie Hall, Beth Meredith, Janet Rojas, Carol Craig Sigler, and Jerry Schwabe.
They meet every Tuesday, and have exhibited together at Ashawagh Hall in Springs. "it’s a closed group. We put things up at the end to look at and critique. We share information, it’s really a support network, and I need it. Painting for me has been soul food."
As with her photographs, her paintings include many waterscapes and landscapes. The earlier works, like the Daniels Hole paintings, yielded around 10 years ago to less expressionistic brushwork and more realism. Works such as "Rocks in February at Fresh Pond" (2013), "Purple Rocks on Gerard Drive" (2014), and "Low Tide Pool at Wainscott" (2015) have a serene, contemplative quality.
In 2015, Ms. Benfield attended a one-week Eastern/Western calligraphy workshop in Venice, Italy, taught by Kazuaki Tanahashi. Ms. Jennings had told her it would change her stroke, "and it does, it gives you real firmness. You know where you're going. It gives you confidence in your own language."
While in Venice, she snapped a photograph of the view from a red bridge. "It was the reflections underneath it, the time of day, the dark shadows." Back home, she started a painting inspired by the scene, but, she said, it was "too literal."
"So then I mixed some color and just started over." The final image is a beautifully modulated abstraction in shades of blue, gray, and white.
During the pandemic Ms. Benfield did a series of striking impressionistic watercolors of tree branches outside her house. Her recent watercolors are more about "what's going on with our weather," including a moody, almost abstract landscape punctuated by distant fires. "I've been going gangbusters on stuff like this right now, which is a little more like creating other worlds."
She cited Winslow Homer, J.M.W. Turner, and Cezanne as influences on her watercolor work, and Gerhard Richter and Willem de Kooning as having an impact on her oils. "I’m constantly moving between artists and reading about them and their process, because there are so many things I want to do."
Ms. Benfield has also been a regular at The Church's popular monotype printmaking workshops in Sag Harbor. She showed a visitor a recent print; its overall darkness, with a few spots of light, suggested the nocturnes of Whistler, whose work she's been studying.
Of her feel for water and waterscapes, she mentioned a Native American saying, "something like, 'Bodies of water are like the eyes of the earth.' I think it’s very true, because they’re always reflecting the light above them. I’ll run between the ocean and the bay for moons and sunsets, especially in the winter when you get these long vistas down the beach."
Her mother lives on New Zealand's South Island, and Ms. Benfield goes back every few years. "It's beautiful down there. It's a unique part of the world. I lost my dad in 2018, so I've gone back more often recently to be with family."
