Benten

Benten, also called Benzaiten, (Japanese: Divinity of the Reasoning Faculty), in Japanese mythology, is one of the Shichi-fuku-jin (Seven Gods of Luck); the Buddhist patron goddess of literature and music, of wealth, and of femininity.

Stanton Macdonald-Wright was born in Virginia and raised in southern California, where he studied at the Art Students League in Los Angeles. As a teenager, he moved to Paris and continued his studies at the Sorbonne, the Académie Colorossi and the École des Beaux Arts. He worked closely with Percyval Hart-Tudor whose teachings on color theory greatly influenced his artistic process. Soon thereafter, he co-founded the avant-garde movement Synchromism with Morgan Russell, which Macdonald-Wright described as meaning ''with color’ as symphony means ‘with sound’, and our idea was to produce an art whose genesis lay, not in objectivity, but in form produced in color’. In 1919, he took a hiatus from painting, only to return to it three decades later in the mid-50s after spending time in Japan as a Fullbright exchange professor. Beginning in 1958, Macdonald-Wright divided his time between Los Angeles and Kyoto.