Woman 2

Woman 2 belongs to Ben Banker's Woman series and carries a clear Japanese woodblock influence. The work is part of a sequence in which visual references from outside the series proper remain present as a sub-layer — almost a holographic overlay, suggesting what exists beneath the visible surface without explaining it.

The study behind the image reaches back roughly thirteen years, when Banker was working through Japanese woodblock imagery alongside martial arts research. Part of that research touched on a little-known concept: finding one's way home when wounded in combat and near death, rather than dying in the field. Years later, the idea took on different weight. After being struck from behind by a car while riding a motorcycle — witnesses at the scene, according to the police report, had to convince him to sit down because he was trying to walk home — he underwent approximately thirty hours of surgery. When he had recovered enough to work, he returned to the studio and began this body of paintings.

Woman 2 holds those layers simultaneously: figuration, study, memory, aftermath, and return. The painting carries intimacy and disturbance in the same atmosphere — not as illustration, but as presence.