Chris Bennett was born in London in 1957 and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in the early ‘80s under Euan Euglow, Geoffrey Camp and Philip Sutton.

Chris has exhibited widely throughout the UK and regularly at the Royal Academy and at the Royal Institute of Oil Painters at the Mall Galleries, London. He has lived in Derbyshire since 1993.

In 2004 Chris signed a publishing contract with DeMontfort Fine Art who license selected works as open and limited editions in the UK, Japan and the USA.

Chris is also an accomplished portrait painter, a notable commission is a portrait of Sir William Hawthorne, now in the collection of Churchill College, Cambridge, who, with Sir Frank Whittle, designed the first jet engine.

“I guess the reason one paints people is because, unlike the camera, the image one ends up with is the result of literally thousands of glances at the subject over a length of time. The camera is just one glance over a millisecond. During this period, a short synthesis builds in the mind, an ordering, a putting things into a self-supporting whole, which is only possible when one is making something over time.”  

Chris Bennett won the C Robertson & Co Award for the most notable work in the Royal Institute of Oil Painters annual exhibition at the Mall Galleries in 2010.

Chris recently exhibited at A&K Wilson, Harpenden where he won the public's vote for "the picture in the exhibition they would most like to take home with them!"