en Norris' painting career goes back 68 years. It began in Southern California and continued in Hawaii from 1936 to 1976. He moved to New York City when he retired from the University of Hawaii as Emeritus Professor of Art. He came to Philadelphia in 1993 to live at Stapeley, the Friendly Retirement Community in Germantown, PA.

Norris became a Friend fifty years ago in Honolulu. Asked about Quakerism or spirituality in his art he responds that he, too, has wondered about that. Norris goes on to explain that for years he had stumbled over the mystery of prayer. The public ministerial prayer of his Methodist child-hood appeared to him to ask for goodies, like victory for our armed forces. This was during WW I and it did not seem to be quite worthy. Eventually he concluded that "prayer with-out ceasing" was what spoke to his condition, or, perhaps speaks from his condition. Brother Lawrence went about his menial duties in the monastery all the while enraptured in his prayer. [Brother Lawrence was a 17th century lay Carmelite whose book The Practice of the Presence of God remains a favorite with many Friends.] For Norris, the language is more like "paying close attention, non-judgmentally, to "what is!"

Since 1993 Norris has been painting large and ambitious watercolors. This focus brought about a suite of 33 Hawaiian Rain Forest subjects, two are reproduced here [unfortunately in black and white]. They are projections of his intense experiences in nature where he took color slides that have served as his "sketches." From the slides and from his imagination he creates these landscape paintings that, in his words, are "explorations of formal resolutions of painterly space."

Environmental attentiveness is present in these works and in the process of creating them. But most of his landscapes do not concentrate on the overt spirituality of nature as you might find it presented in the journal Earth Light (published by the Unity with Nature Committee of Pacific Yearly Meeting). The paintings also document a process of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" as many of the Hawaiian forest species have long since been replaced by introduced trees and plants. This process continues into the present day where many of the already introduced foreign plants are replaced by a newer ornamental vine, the lovely but deadly Thumbergia grandiflora, that twines upward to smother its unwitting support system.

Ben Norris remains a vibrant member of both the artistic and Quaker community.