“That’s why I like monotypes. They’re spontaneous. Accidents happen. They’re better than you can contrive yourself. You submit to that big wide squeegee. You never know how they’ll come out.” - Tom Benton

Benton’s life changed drastically during the fifth decade of his life. Tom and Betty divorced in 1975, triggering the sale of the gallery, and he shifted from the clean lines and sharp edges of silkscreen printing toward experimenting with large monotypes.

In what Benton called “screen paintings,” the ink is forced through the screen with a squeegee onto the paper, without a stencil to influence the result. The outcome is rather unpredictable as the thickness of the paint and motion of the artist influences the final product. Benton turned to strong grays, blues, reds and yellows in these pieces, which are each one of a kind.

Creating the monotypes was far from clean and straightforward. Because the artist knows only a little bit of what will happen, he cannot anticipate the exact final product. As a result, many of these works are a strong departure from Benton’s orderly and methodical silkscreen prints.

As Benton described his process in a 1992 interview: “You’ve got to have all things going for you at once—luck, and everything. If everything goes well, it comes out much better than you could have done if you had been fully... in control of your faculties. But you can’t plan it too much. It’s too haphazard.”