Max Benjamin American, 1928-2025
Born in 1928 in San Diego, Max Benjamin studied painting at the University of Washington in Seattle. After graduation, he eventually relocated to a remote island in Western Washington, where he committed himself to painting in solitude and developing a distinctive abstract style over decades.
Max Benjamin was born in 1928 in San Diego. After serving in the U.S. Navy, he used GI benefits to study art at the University of Washington in Seattle, graduating in 1954. In 1959, he moved with his family to Guemes Island in Puget Sound, leaving a secure job at Boeing to live and work in a rustic log cabin, devoting himself to painting full time while supporting himself through cattle raising and occasional longshoreman work.
Initially influenced by early 20th-century European modernists and by teachers such as Ambrose Patterson and Walter F. Isaacs, Benjamin’s early work combined landscape references with abstraction. Over time, he shifted toward non-representational abstraction, creating large-scale paintings defined by non-referential color, jagged lines, and an emphasis on the flatness of the canvas.
Benjamin approached painting as an intuitive, process-driven practice, rarely sketching and instead repeatedly reworking surfaces until a painting felt complete. He typically identified works by number and year rather than signing them. Living and working in a sparse, unheated studio on Guemes Island, he continued painting daily well into his eighties.
His work is held in major institutional collections, including the Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Throughout his career, Benjamin remained independent of prevailing trends, committed to personal expression and artistic integrity.