Bennett estimates that he’s created hundreds of oil paintings here in Astoria, inspired by the energy of the northwest coast, its people and places.

Despite his move to a smaller market, when Bennett arrived in Oregon, his paintings sold like hotcakes. “Boy did that feel good! I never really got that in Connecticut.”Īs the saying goes, you get what you give, and Bennett’s youthful vigor attracted many fans and many believers. Everyone I ran into had a smile,” Bennett says. “What makes this area great is the people. ”And it wasn’t just the place, which enchanted him, it was also the people. “When one explodes into expressionistic painting it’s almost like another person comes out,” he says. His style became even looser, more abstract, and more spontaneous. “It was flowing like crazy, I couldn’t stop painting.” The move was a significant turning point in his career. “When I got here, everything became alive again,” Bennett says. When a friend brought him out to Astoria he was instantly hooked, and he moved here in 1989. But after years catering to the needs of publishing giants Simon and Schuster, Western Printing, and Avon Press, the artist was spent and looking for a new muse and a new beginning.īennett migrated to Oregon in 1986. The New York Society of Illustrators awarded him a bronze medal for the drawings he created to illustrate a boxed, collectors’ edition of Dante's Divine Comedy published in 1966. He also caught the attention of the mainstream art world. Not all of Bennett's work in those decades was destined for mass market paperbacks. Bennett painted them all large, so he could stay loose and fast.'I like to bounce off the easel, I can't do that when I'm standing still,' he says. As a simple internet search will reveal, even worn gothic paperbacks with Harry Bennett cover art get special notice. The covers were works of art, and are collected to this day. 'Because I could paint a woman sowell I was never without work,' says Bennett.

Bennett's paintings of women had caught the eye of publishing execs, and he quickly became one of the most sought after gothic romance illustrators. He is a wonderful, patient, loving man with a brilliant sense of both design and direct power with the plastic medium.'īennett spent much of his early career shuttling back and forth between New York and his home in Connecticut.

Tom, his younger son and an artist as well, said: 'I lived and breathed his studio and wanted to be him. He studied art at the American Academy of Art in Chicago and worked as a painter and illustrator back in Connecticut for clients such as Pepsi-Cola and U.S.Keds and he raised 5 children as a freelancer.

Elisa_rolleBorn in Lewisboro, NY, in 1925 to Anna Karlsson Bennett, a swedish immigrant who had recently been widowed, Harry Bennett was raised in Ridgefield, Ct and went on to serve in the south Pacific during World War ll.

My Lord Monleigh by Jan Cox Speas