About Ben Vanderwerff

Ben Vanderwerff is a Washington-based painter known for large-scale, on-site works that capture the raw atmosphere of the Pacific Northwest. Raised in the Skagit Valley, he works primarily in acrylic, spray paint, and mixed media, building his paintings outdoors in the same environments that inspire them—rivers, forests, mountain roads, and remote seasonal terrain.

Ben studied graphic design and later apprenticed for three years in industrial design at Hadrian Stone Design, where he worked hands-on with GFRC concrete, wood, metal, and custom fabrication. That background shaped his material intuition and his direct, physical approach to painting.

His work has been shown at Harris Harvey Gallery in Seattle, Lido Gallery, Cole Gallery, Ida Victoria Gallery in Los Cabos, The Good Stuff Gallery, Dos Lobos Gallery, and other regional exhibitions across Washington and Baja.

Ben currently lives and works in the Skagit Valley, painting on location year-round and developing bodies of work rooted in discomfort, movement, and immersion in real landscapes.

Painting for me is not a career choice — it’s survival. It’s the way I carry the weight of what I see in people: their decisions, their struggles, their relationships, their attempts to hold themselves together. When life presses down, I turn to the landscape, because it mirrors that same tension and resilience.

I paint outdoors because I need the landscape to push back on me. My process is not about comfort or studio control — it’s about exposure. I camp for days in the mountains or along rivers, living simply out of my vehicle, letting the weather, silence, and isolation shape how the work unfolds. The act of painting becomes inseparable from the act of being alive in that place.

The materials I use — spray paint and acrylics — give me immediacy. They let me move fast, force decisions, and work at the scale that matches how I feel standing inside the environment. Each painting is built under shifting skies and changing light, layered with the messiness of real conditions. These imperfections matter; they’re what makes the painting breathe.

What I’m after is not a picture of a place, but a presence — something that carries the energy of being within it. My paintings are records of that immersion: part wilderness, part human experience, part survival. They are how I process the world, and how I give it back..