WEST PALM BEACH, FL--"My name is Bennie Holmes, I'm sixty years of age, and art if what I love."
The Bennie Holmes with the tiny studio next to the railroad tracks in West Palm is a different man from the Bennie Holmes who brandished a gun and got hard time for it.
"I didn't kill anyone. I went to prison for robbery back in '72 and got 40 years."
He served 20 years.
Some men find God behind bars. Some men became jail house lawyers.
Bennie found art.
And when he got out, he took the ideas in the drawings and stuck them to mirrors all the while thinking about one thing.
"Fashion...Fashion...look at the abstract...take a picture of that and put it on silk."
That's right, Bennie Holmes wants to be a fashion designer.
He already has the accessories.
"I got the hat, the shoes the pocketbook, all match."
From sketches conceived behind bars to the most basic of materials, it's art that is getting attention.
"The name of this is Miss America because everything in its head happened in America."
His tiny West Palm Beach apartment is full of his work, even the matchstick tennis racquets he'd love to show the Williams sisters or the designer shoes made of matchsticks.
Intricate and detailed, the work is painstaking all of it starting with boxes of matches and mirror that begs him to"take hammer and break it," he says.
It's art born from junk.
"I take match sticks broken mirror seashells, put it all together. This is what you see," Bennie explains.
For more information on Bennie's art you can go to
PEstlund@hotmail.com
