John Benson: A Man of Historic Talents

By: Natalia Minasi
Posted In: News

“Then all you do is take a chisel and chop it out.”

Those are the simple directions John Everett Benson, previous owner of The John Stevens Shop, gives to stone carving after the lettering is designed and traced and painted onto the stone. A person may think he or she is about to color in the lines of a child’s coloring book- that’s how nonchalantly and effortlessly Benson makes stone cutting to be. Of course, not everyone has the talent, credibility, training, experience or good genes of the Benson family.

If you make a quick turn off of Newport’s Elm Street onto Cross, a standard weathered garage with grey siding and forest green trim will catch your eye. The building is simple and traditional, but its colonial-like appearance dominates the street. Inside the garage-turned-studio, the smell of art and creativity color the walls while original sculptures adorn the studio’s main floor workshop.

John ‘Fud’ Benson, a man of many artistic talents, leads a visitor through his studio, stopping to heat up his coffee in the microwave before heading next door to The John Stevens Shop. “It’s awfully cold in there,” Benson said. About 10 steps outside Benson’s studio, there is a door that will transport any visitor back to the 1700’s when the shop first opened. The shop is cold and airy. The colonial Williamsburg atmosphere, classic tools and pulleys and rustic workshop appearance contrasts with the present times. The smell of wood, paper, and stone engulf you as you walk through the shop, passing gravestones and a granite sign in the process of being carved. John Benson stops at a large drawing table where his son Nick, currently out to lunch with his worker, is sketching daffodils for a gravestone he is carving. Sitting on a high stool you can look around the shop and take in the walls adorned with shelves filled to capacity with vintage books and parchments alongside slates of stone, tools, chisels, hammers, and carvings.

A tall, slender, fit man with grey hair, a moustache and a unique assortment of artistic talents, John Everett Benson, adjusts his glasses as he begins to talk about his past, his talents, and what it’s like to be a part of a long line of tradition and artistic ability.

The John Stevens Shop, established in 1705 (seventy years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence), recently celebrated its 300 year anniversary in 2005. Its appearance and business are true to its founding father, John Stevens. Today the shop, with forest green paint siding mirroring the trim on Benson’s studio, white trim and red windows and door, sustains the colonial tradition as the oldest continually operating business in the United States.

Born in 1939 and raised in Newport, Benson called Washington Street home as a child. He grew up on the Pier and found a passion for sailing and boating through his father. “It was Heaven on earth,” Benson said, when showing me a picture of his father’s boat with his home in the background and he and his two brothers scattered around on the boat. His father, John Howard Benson, lived for the water when he was not working. The senior Benson bought The John Stevens Shop from the last remaining Stevens relative in 1927. When he died in 1956, John Everett Benson’s mother kept the place going before her son soon took over the business.

John, more commonly known as Fud to his friends and family, went to the local schools before attending Rhode Island School of Design. There he earned a degree in Sculpture and studied for a year in Rome under the Honors program senior year. “I graduated in 1961 with a wife, a baby, and a degree in the arts, which really wasn’t any sort of stepping stone to economic success,” said Benson. “So I came back to the shop and started working.”

Benson first started working at the shop during the summer and after school when he was 15. He was learning letter carving from his father, who, according to Benson “had a huge natural talent for the arts.” “I had to fight for it,” Benson said. “I had no desire to get into the business at all. My father was a wonderful artist. I had to pull myself out from his shadow.”

The reluctant stone carver pursued, though, and is now a renowned artist who has carved his way through the family business into success and distinction. “We are very well known in this narrow branch of applied arts, but rock stars we’re not,” Benson said. “We are definitely recognized. It feels great to be a part of that. Letter carving is what we do.”

Sculptor, letter carver, shop owner, Benson can also add to his resume and list of accomplishments that he has been in a film produced in 1978. Filmmakers Frank Muhly, Jr. and Peter O’Neill took notice of John Benson’s work in their documentary Final Marks: The Art of the Carved Letter, “a classic documentary about lettercutting, in both monumental inscriptions and on gravestones.” The men chronicle Benson as he and his associates “lay out and then execute the inscriptions on the then unfinished East Building of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.” The film then follows Benson as he visits John F. Kennedy’s gravesite in Arlington Cemetery-a job commissioned to the renowned letter cutter when he was only 25. For two years the filmmakers had complete access to The John Stevens Shop and Benson’s work.

“The question of course arises why go through all this trouble to get a name on a building, why carve it into the stone, why carve it in this particular fashion, and the answer is really two fold. First of all there is a tremendous emotional appeal about a carved letter. It partakes of the substance of the building. And of the carved letters this particular style has the best historical association and the most ready communication with the material itself. Our infatuation with slate goes back to the purchase of the shop in the late 20’s. The reason we’re so infatuated with it is because its so responsive. You can do almost anything with it. Once the stone is carved it retains its look almost forever,” said Benson in Final Marks.

Among Benson’s many artistic talents also comes the artistic lettering of calligraphy-an art his father John Howard Benson was very skilled at and published books on.

“John Benson was very personable,” said Lisa Kotlen of Newport, who studied calligraphy with Benson when she was a young girl. “He loved what he did. He loved letters and it was because of his love for letters and his love for the arts that I became as interested as I did.”

“He was the one who told me when you do a piece of calligraphy or any piece of art you are going to look at the surrounding shapes and forms and that’s what forms the calligraphy, not the letters themselves but the surrounding shapes,” said Kotlen. Benson taught her flourishing and encouraged Kotlen to develop her own personal style. She then went on to work in art studios in D.C. and did consignment work for the White House.

For a man who is a master of artistic abilities with his hands, Benson’s musical talents fall nicely into place with his love for the fiddle. He heard Pete Seeger in 1958, “the man who really revived folk music.” “He changed my life,” said Benson. Benson, or Fud to his friends and fans, has played for 30 odd years as a member of Jim McGrath and the Reprobates, a self described “saloon band.” Sunday March 29 Fud played with Tim May (plays guitar, banjo, and mandolin) and fiddler Jack Wright at the Fastnet Pub on Broadway in Newport.

“Fud is a very knowledgeable folk musician and singer who knows many interesting tunes and songs in a variety of folk genres,” said Tim May, who has known Fud for about five years. “He seems to especially like high tempo Irish fiddling which I find very enjoyable to play along with. He’s an engaging performer who knows how to communicate with a crowd from a stage.”

Back in the shop Benson’s son returns from lunch and soon the steady beat of the hammer and chisel resounds. The John Stevens Shop, amidst all the technology and computers present in today’s American society, is still thriving on its heritage and unique tradition. Even during an age when commercialization, speed, and money appear to run business, one thing is certain with John Benson-stone cutting, and talent, is carved in the Benson blood.