It wasn’t until I understood that I would only be happy if I do everything and that all these elements make up the artist in me.” “I have a bachelor’s in sociology, and I was always lost, never knowing what to do in life. “I’ve been going back and forth between music, art and academics,” Rooftop said. “Many of my fellow colleagues are from different parts the world, which really opened my mind to other ways of thinking,” Rooftop said.Īlthough he dedicates most of his time nowadays to painting and working towards his master’s degree in public administration, he said he does not want to be held down by artistic labels. Rooftop said the university offered opportunities for him to grow, but it was the people he met after joining the Master of Public Administration Student Association that really allowed him to flourish. Although I love Bowie, my high school, I have always seen UTEP as the place where I got to discover myself.” I have always been grateful to UTEP for allowing a lost kid from the south side projects the ability to choose his own path. “I love this city, its art and especially its people. “I am a proud product of El Paso,” Rooftop said. His palette choice and artistic style are a good fit with traditional Texas and Mexican art. Underneath, a ghost-white woman shaded in pencil closes her lips on a few feathers, suggesting that she swallowed one of the hummingbirds.Ī native of El Paso, Rooftop said he owes much of his inspiration to the Sun City and UTEP. The heartache he mentions materializes in an especially eerie painting in which blue and yellow hummingbirds contrast against the black and purple background, flying around an anatomically correct heart hanging above them like a fruit. Working mostly with oil on canvas, Rooftop’s paintings showcase a flutter of moths around objects, whether they are wilting flowers in a vase, a dangling light bulb, or a skull blended into a crescent moon.

That’s what all my paintings are me just getting rid of sadness to make room for more people and things to love.”

I’ve never been good at communicating my feelings, especially sadness. “They’re about childhood traumas and points in my life when I went through self-discovery. “My paintings are about heartache via failed romantic relationships,” Rooftop said. The UTEP graduate student and artist said his work is about the darker side of human emotion, emotions he cannot express any other way than to put them on a canvas. Benny Rooftop paints his heartache into moths, flower, and birds by dipping into the world of surrealistic art.

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