Benjamin Michael Bader was born in Clarksville, Tennessee in April of 1980 the fourth and youngest child of a carpenter / sculptor father and a seamstress / English teacher mother. From the age of four, his family nomadically traveled about the United States from Virginia to as far north as Alaska before settling in Ohio when he was eight. Home schooled through fifth grade, Ben started into Fairborn city schools in sixth grade and graduated from Fairborn High School in the spring of 1998. Despite various periods of interest in the fields of mathematcs, physics, chemistry, architecture, medicine and astronomy, he realized shortly before graduating that his true passion lay in the creation of art.
Upon graduating, he enrolled at Cedarville College (now Cedarville University) to begin a degree in Communications. Unfortunately, after some deliberation, he dropped out after two quarters with the intent of attending a bona fide "art school." It wasn't until the fall of 2002 that Ben returned to college part–time at Sinclair Community College where he began taking art classes once more.
Inspired by a great number of artists spanning several centuries (including but not limited to Leonardo DaVinci, Alphonse Mucha, Rene Lalique, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Michelangelo de Caravaggio, Filippo Brunelleschi, Norman Rockwell, Alberto Vargas, Boris Valejo, and Andy Warhol), Benjamin Bader's work tends to focus on taking various styles and mediums from the past and blending them with something new and fresh.
George Bernard Shaw once said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Benjamin's ultimate goal is to be the unreasonable man.