01 / ARTISTIC PRACTICE
Live Painting
Make space for art.
Intermodal creative practice
My intermodal creative practice unfolds where image, music, performance, and audience meet in real time. I have painted on world-class stages alongside internationally celebrated musicians, allowing painting to become movement, sound to become encounter, and performance to become a shared creative experience. Yet this practice has never belonged only to the stage. I have painted across the globe in spaces ranging from renowned concert halls, museums, and cultural institutions to homeless shelters, safe homes, hospitals, communities facing crisis, and cancer research settings. The context changes, but the impulse remains the same: to use creativity as a language through which people can encounter one another, connect, and belong.
At the 2010 Freedom Awards in Los Angeles, I painted live alongside Rocky Dawuni, Luc and the Lovingtons, Jason Mraz, and the Makepeace Brothers. The completed painting was auctioned to help fund my expressive arts project with a village in India recently liberated from debt bondage, in partnership with Free the Slaves. This movement between artistic performance and humanitarian action has become a thread throughout my practice. A painting born through music and collective experience can move beyond the stage, carrying energy, resources, and human connection into another community. For me, art forms are not separate disciplines. They are intermodal pathways into shared humanity, capable of opening hearts across borders and transforming creative experience into meaningful action.
Selected Live Works
Science and art dance together. Eyes, birds, wolves, color, movement, anatomy, and human presence emerge through the immediacy of painting live. A scarlet macaw takes flight inside the Columbus Crew stadium; an eagle emerges during a leadership convention in San Diego; an owl looks outward from a skyscraper gathering of Fortune 500 executives; a wolf takes form in Québec City. Each is created in response to a particular environment, yet the animals become more than symbols. They invite us to remember that human experience exists within a much larger living system, where observation and imagination, biology and emotion, instinct and intellect continually inform one another. Live painting allows that relationship to remain unfinished until the moment itself completes it. Music, conversation, architecture, audience, movement, and place enter the work as it is being made. From stadiums and corporate towers to intimate community spaces, I am interested in what happens when the analytical and the intuitive combine.
Live Paintings
Image one: National Mural Awards, Hagerstown, Maryland, 2026, first prize in public, live graffiti battle. Image two: Live painting at corporate event in W Philadelphia at 2025 corporate event. All participants in convention painted on the blank canvas and then Benjamin unified their contributions into a single voice.
The studio in public
Live creation brings the vulnerability and immediacy of the studio into public space. At Authenica’s Master Piece Live in Cleveland, I lined up three blank canvases inside a movie theater and, over 45 minutes, painted all three while dancing, playing flute, and responding to musicians including Humble G the Fiddler and Luc Reynaud. Painting, music, movement, performers, and audience became part of a single unfolding experience. The challenge was intentional: to push the edges of what felt possible while remaining present enough to listen, improvise, connect, and allow each art form to influence the others. The painting in the right is one of the three compositions that emerged.
The three paintings pictured above me on the left were created at entirely different moments, yet when brought together they begin speaking across space and time. Color palettes echo, forms answer one another, and a shared vibrancy connects experiences that were never originally intended to coexist. This is part of what fascinates me about a life of creative practice: each work holds the immediacy of the moment in which it was born, yet can enter new relationships long after that moment has passed. The paintings emerged in real time among dialogue, movement, and exchange. For me, this is where art has an important place in conversations about the future. Technology can expand what is possible, leadership can shape where we go, but creativity reconnects those possibilities to imagination, emotion, intuition, and relationship. As our tools become more sophisticated, the question of how we remain connected to one another becomes increasingly important.
Color in motion
These works hold different moments in a lifelong conversation between painting, music, movement, and audience. The painting at upper left marks the beginning: the first painting of my career created live in collaboration with music before an audience, at Weingaleria in Berlin, Germany, in 2006. Surrounded by international jazz musicians and world soul reggae singer Luc Reynaud, rhythm entered the brushstroke, improvisation shaped color and gesture, and the musicians and I began responding to one another through different creative languages. Years later, the work below emerged onstage at Agape International Spiritual Center, surrounded by the power of its international choir, the music of Rickie Byars Beckwith and once again Luc Reynaud. Across these experiences, the compositions embody their own intermodal language through improvisation and encounter. Music moves through the body, the body moves the brush, and the painting becomes a visual record of something that existed only once, between artist, musicians, audience, and moment.
Painting as an Open Conduit
These paintings emerged across radically different environments: an Authenica event at Starbucks in Seattle, where coffee grounds became part of the medium; the boardwalk of Venice Beach; creative encounters with Syrian refugees in Ioannina, Greece; Los Angeles; and countless moments beyond. Together, they form less a collection of places than a collection of embodied moments, each carrying something of the atmosphere, people, energy, and circumstances in which it came into being.
Witness and Transformation
Each live painting is allowed to become entirely itself, without hierarchy, judgment, or comparison. One moment may erupt into abstraction; another may reveal an eagle, a mountain, a face, or an unexpected symbol. Whatever flows in the moment is welcomed. The practice is not about repeating an aesthetic, but remaining open to what wants to emerge.
Years of painting provide a vocabulary held in the body, yet I resist deciding beforehand how it should be spoken. Place, music, people, movement, and atmosphere enter the process. Each work becomes both witness and transformation, a record of an unrepeatable encounter shaped by creativity moving freely in the moment. In live performance and collective creation, my intention is to suspend preconceived projections of what a painting should become. Rather than impose an image upon the canvas, I try to become an open conduit, listening and responding as color, gesture, material, music, environment, and human connection begin to guide the work themselves. The painting is not simply made in a place; the place enters the painting. In this state, creation becomes an encounter with the unknown, a practice of presence in which artist, audience, environment, and artwork participate in discovering what wants to emerge.
Live Painting at the NFL Hall of Fame
At the NFL Hall of Fame, an Authentica gathering brought together executives and thought leaders to explore leadership, emergent technology, and human connection. I painted live within that conversation, allowing the creative process itself to become another way of asking what it means to remain deeply human while the technologies surrounding us rapidly evolve. The paintings emerged in real time among dialogue, movement, and exchange. For me, this is where art has an important place in conversations about the future. Technology can expand what is possible, leadership can shape where we go, but creativity reconnects those possibilities to imagination, emotion, intuition, and relationship. As our tools become more sophisticated, the question of how we remain connected to one another becomes increasingly important.
Full list of international venues, musical collaborators, festivals, benefit shows, conventions, and corporate events are available upon request.