Benjamin Frey has been a professional artist Since 2003,  but has been involved in art for most of his life. He was born in Maine in 1979 and, following the examples of his father and grandfather, his early artworks were representational, landscape paintings. In 1998, he was introduced to the idea and possibilities of collage through a professional artist who became his artistic mentor.  He received formal training in Philosophy and Literature at St. Johns College, Annapolis, MD, and in visual art at the Art Students League of New York.

His works have won in many juried competitions over the past several years and may be seen in galleries in New York, Illinois, Virginia, and Tennessee and are included in numerous private collections in the United States and abroad.




I use a wide variety of traditional and contemporary techniques in creating my artworks. Each is a blend of original and found imagery combined with collaged and altered papers, fabrics, antique book pages and musical scores as well as pastels, graphite, textured acrylic paint, watercolors, and glazes. In many collages, I also include string, wire and other found objects assembled inside recessions cut into the panel.

These raw materials I combine in many different layers forming an image more like a picture of a thought or an idea than a montaged “scene.” I begin with a background of old book pages, etchings, sketches, and tissues which I color with textured acrylic paint. In this first layer, I often sand, scrape, and tear the pages creating a varied, distressed surface with a unified appearance at a distance, but which rewards the curious viewer with more detail as one approaches. I choose texts which comment on the subject of the collage and also provide perspectives to help interpret the foreground.  In the next layer I add drawings and ink transfers over the paint so that the underlying papers appear through them. I then collage handmade and painted papers in a pattern, leaving the background to show through in other spaces. On these papers I add  drawings, geometrical patterns, and found images which I alter with pastels, watercolors and graphite. On the top of all this I paint an original acrylic landscape that gives setting and mood to the collage. The landscape is often an abstract scene of the ocean, fields, or woods, and the colors I  choose intensify the emotions which I feel the scene evokes. I will often break up this image, which is painted directly on top of the torn and textured papers, and paint it in several places, giving the illusion that it, too, has been found and pasted into the scene.

 I aim for an art which communicates through familiar curios a fresh and bold perspective on the responsibilities we have to contemplate and participate in the human condition.

Artist's Statement

In the beginning, mine is the art of collecting. The collages I create are made from papers handmade around the world,  lost letters, century old book pages, manuscripts, forgotten images from old auction catalogs and great works from the timeless masters of music, art and literature. Each component in a single collage has its own history, which I cannot know, that it has carried through the ages, imparting countless meanings of worldly and personal significance to those who encounter it. By collecting the many objects and images together I am trying to create a visual Poetry that will inspire memories and evoke emotions in the people who view my work. The images transform when they breathe together in a new context, they draw new life from the rhymes created between what you see and what you imagine. I want the life and experiences that you bring to my work as the viewer to blend with the emotions, ideas, and histories of the components themselves. The experience you have is the art.