The Texture of Time

Bennett Prize winner Amy Werntz create works of art that celebrate the beauty that only comes with age

- BY SARAH GIANELLI

Amy Werntz is quick to share that she has always had an unusual preoccupation with time, the passage of it, and a fear of being forgotten and what will happen to the things she holds dear when it runs out.

A sensitive artist, Werntz has poured these themes into her paintings, which often depict the elderly, creating a body of work that recently earned her the coveted $50,000 Bennett Prize, after being a finalist once before. Despite her fixation on the arc of life, death and what comes after, Werntz seems surprisingly at ease with the aging process, something she attributes to having close relationships with her grandparents throughout her life. As a result, she sees the accumulation of years and the marks it leaves on our bodies as beautiful and worthy of celebration.

“As far as pure subject matter goes, they're fun to paint, the patterns in the skin...but on another level it’s really about our culture’s negative perception of aging,” says Werntz. “I think it’s important to get the work out there, and for people to see that in art because old people can be so overlooked. In my mind they're beautiful and it’s just another way to look at beauty.”

For some people, Werntz’s paintings of older subjects are triggering. “The only negative responses I ever get about the work is from older women,” shares Werntz, adding that she lives in Dallas, which might be one of the “plastic surgery “capitals of the world.” She recounts receiving a somewhat nasty email from a woman in her upper 70s. “She said she wasn't accepting aging well and how she finds all of these people so ugly...and why don't I make them smile rather than look so grim.