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2016 Denton Arts and Jazz Festival
Featured Artist
Ernie Benton

Ernie Benton's featured art
"Time 2 Play"

Ernie with "Spoken Softly"
acrylic painting

Ernie

Ernie Benton is a contemporary artist who loves listening to music. In particular, he loves listening to jazz as he paints. He is the featured artist for the 2016 Denton Arts and Jazz Festival.

An important aspect of the Denton Arts and Jazz Festival is the juried art show. Artists booths are both indoors and out, with artists and craftsmen representing Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Arkansas, Oregon and beyond. Fine art is housed inside the Denton Civic Center while Fine Art and Crafts are located immediately outside the building. You will find Ernie in the Civic Center area showing some of his newest works.

The Denton Arts and Jazz Festival is a celebration of the arts in a community known for embracing and nurturing music, dance, choral, drama and the visual arts. The free event is produced by the Denton Festival Foundation, Inc. with the generous support of sponsors such as the Dallas/Fort Worth American Federation of Musicians Local 72-147 and the city of Denton. Ernie has participated in this great event for 11 of the past 12 years.

A native of Chicago, Ernie feels he has been blessed in many ways: by his early and continuing interest in art, by a wonderful and strong mother who supported and encouraged him, by a father who introduced him to love Blues and Jazz; and today by a wife who works in the background helping to keep him focused and creative. As fortune would have it he relocated to the DFW Texas area in 2002. He and his wife now live in the north Fort Worth area of Denton County.

Ernie is self-taught and considers himself a contemporary artist who loves the creative vibes of painting while listening to his music. To Ernie, art is essential to the human experience. He states "I like to use art as an opportunity to inform, educate, and ignite the interest of art lovers and students alike. My paintings are created to depict the sounds, flavor, and vibrations of life and I hope that in some small way larger opportunities are generated for communication and understanding." You see the influence of Jazz and Blues in many of his works, whether in the lyrical compositions of shape, form and texture, or in the deliberate embrace of instrumentation characterizations that flow from his brush’s interpretation of sounds.

Ernie is actively involved in local art activities, public art projects, and participates in selective local and national art festivals and private and public art exhibitions. His paintings are very collectable and hang in many fine homes and private collections across the United States including Georgia, California, Virginia, Maryland, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, DC, Kansas, Oklahoma, and in the collection of Northlake College in Irving, Texas. His painting “Quaker Town” commissioned by the City of Denton Texas Public Art Projects hangs in the Denton City Hall.