The inspiration for Botanicus comes from a deep appreciation of our green spaces, specifically Anderson Park in Townsville. The lotus flower rises from the mud and is a symbol of purity and the sacred feminine. The unopened and opened petals represent various stages of one’s unfolding in life.

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This work was part of a Group 6 exhibition with local artists Marg Crawford and Ros Jones.

​What’s in a Face? comprises of 36 portraits incorporating the sitter’s emotional marks and colours. Through a process of exploring the features of the face, each sitter identified key marks and developed a colour palette that is an individual and unique expression of themselves.

This exhibition has been influenced by the great Gustav Klimt’s portrayal of women mainly featured during his gold phase. With the use of gold leaf and reference to his Tree of Life mural, these works depict the expressive nature of gesture through hands and limbs and the symbolism of eternity through the bird.    

This was a joint exhibition with Townsville potter Tony Di Giacamo. 

"A Question of Counterpoint" is my latest body of work, and it has pushed me to explore portraiture on a whole new level. No longer is the sitter visually recognizable, as their emotional marks and their collective consciousness are captured in a new vision.

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This body of work is a relatively new exploration of the genre of portraiture which is referred to as Expanded Portraiture.

“here & away” implies a sense of place. However, in the Buddhist tradition, all exists in the present moment in time. There is no beginning and there is no end.  This sense of eternity is fundamental to my work which is presented here on both canvas and slate tiles.

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This work was part of a Group 6 exhibition with local artist Ros Jones and Margaret Crawford.

After the Townsville floods and After the COVID lockdown that delayed this exhibition initially scheduled in June 2020.

This exhibition was influenced by the work of Amedeo Modigliani and Vincent Van Gogh as I empathise with their treatment of the subject and the themes of isolation, loneliness and the struggle to understand the human predicament that is implicit in their work.

This was a joint exhibition with Townsville potter Tony Di Giacamo. 

This exhibition, comprises of over 30 portraits on canvas and 21 works on slate tiles. The canvas works in the main body of the gallery, all depict local people and include a representation of one of their many past lives. This includes a 500,000-year-old hunter and gatherer, a falconer, fisherman and Knight from the Middle ages to the more contemporary lives of musicians, islanders and an English gentleman and lady. 

This collection features all Beningfield's portraits that have been selected as finalists in The Percivals since its inception.  

This body of work portrays a range of past and present Townsville citizens from a doctor to a builder, poet to a lawyer, soldier to a hairdresser. Local communities are made up of a rich diversity of people. The word “community” is derived from the Latin word communitas, things held in common, a broad term for fellowship or organised society. The portraits in this exhibition are a selection of diverse people from Townsville representing different professions and life interests; however, they are all connected through their contribution to the community. 

Spirituality is explored through a series of figurative mixed media works. Examining primal opposites such as birth and death, love and sadness, reflection and ecstasy, loss and accretion.  These works explore the Celtic metaphor of “thin places” which is understood to be a tissue thin veil between heaven and earth where human beings experience a sense of the divine. 

This work is an attempt to explore cultural change through the exploration of a variety of media to depict what personifies notions of the contemporary bride.In different cultural contexts, the bride takes the form of objects as varied as the Eiffel tower, a fairground ride or even a 2D anime character.  In the 12th century, a bride was defined as being “A newly married woman or a woman about to be married.”  However, in the past 20 years, our accepted notion of what constitutes a newly married woman has evolved. There are now many countries were gay marriage is legal which poses the question of who is in fact “the bride”. 

This body of work explores the metaphysical properties of Essential Oils through the representation and beauty of the female form. The technique of watercolour using acrylic medium and essential oils on canvas has been explored to capture my interpretation of the mystic characteristics of each oil. These oils contain both a physical and metaphysical benefit and are linked to the seven “master charkas” in the body that sit vertically along the spinal column 

These paintings explore The Lost Art of Letter Writing as a phenomenon that is occurring due to our ever-increasing reliance on multi-media communication.The social media has fundamentally changed the way we communicate and rewritten the boundaries between the public self and the private self. Professor Geoffrey Bolton, one of Australia’s most eminent historians says that is will be difficult to know in the future how people of this era were thinking due to the short life span of emails.  Websites such as Facebook and Twitter have effectively replaced the slower mode of  letter writing and redefined our sense of private communication.   

The Enneagram is an ancient, accurate model of personality types.  There are nine types (or "enneatypes", "ennea" means "nine"), which are universally identified by the numbers 1 to 9. Each type has both a vice and virtue associated with the personality.  The exhibition explores the use of hand gestures to symbolize these underlying emotions and patterns of behaviour. 

This is a small group exhibition of figurative works which echo the shadows of reality and suggest how we are perceived, especially by males.  The use of the shadow is symbolic of the power that men can have over woman and how we are shaped in their perception.  The works also explore the stereotypical images of woman as they are seen from the male perspective. 

The body of works for this exhibition reflects what young people experience when a relationship comes to an end – they feel totally broken, bruised and lonely.  Aspects of broken relationships are represented through the images of five young people aged between 15 and 25, although they could be any man or woman suffering in love.  This loss and uncertainty is not gender specific and each of the images explores a different emotion and response to the pain of letting go. The works are loosely based on the titles and/or lyrics of certain vocal artists, such as Lucinda Williams and Ryan Adams. 

The butterfly is a universal symbol of beauty, joy and the essence of happiness.  Its metamorphosis from caterpillar to moth is one of the great mysteries of nature. Round the world in many different cultures, butterflies are seen as the departed souls of our ancestors. Indigenous people recognize the chrysalis as the soul trapped inside the body. The emergence of the adult butterfly symbolizes the freedom of the soul upon death which is epitimized in this small group exhibition. 

This body of work explores the sacrifice that young teenagers will undertake to ensure they have the latest in mobile technology to be accepted by their peers.  In an age of rapid adcancing social media, these works investigate how communication is changing our interactions.
 

The Enneagram is a powerful psychological and spiritual system describing nine basic personality types.  Our personality (habitual patterns of behaving, thinking and feeling) result from a particular focus of attention.  This perceptual filter, developed to protect our childhood vulnerability, may hinder our development in adulthood.  The Enneagram helps us decide whether or not to respect old patterns or to take new paths to develop our inborn gifts.  Nine canvases represent the nine Enneogram types and the other three are composite images of some of the virtues, passions and fixations of the Enneagram.   

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