There is a particular kind of intimacy that portraiture can achieve only when the sitter isn't performing for the artist—when there is no pose being held, no awareness of being seen. Amy Werntz has built her career on that kind of looking. Carlyla is its most personal expression yet, and it is why we are so pleased to welcome the painting by Werntz, The Bennett Prize 4 winner, into The Bennett Collection.
The subject is Carlyla Woofter, Werntz's own grandmother, rendered at nearly a century of age with a tenderness that borders on reverence. The eyes are the painting's quiet center—heavy-lidded, clouded with the delicate opacity of cataracts. Carlyla is blind. She will never see the portrait that bears her name, and at the time it was painted, she didn't even know it existed.
Werntz, who lives and works in Dallas, came to fine art painting somewhat sideways—she holds a BFA in Interior Design from the Art Institute of Dallas—and has spent the last decade turning her exacting eye almost exclusively toward elderly subjects. Diners, sidewalks, kitchen tables: the ordinary settings where old age is so often rendered invisible. She frequently works from old, sometimes discarded photographs, recovering moments someone else had already let go of.
That body of work had already earned Werntz recognition — Signature Status with the Portrait Society of America, a finalist spot in the second Bennett Prize cycle in 2021, features in Artists Magazine, Fine Art Connoisseur, and International Artists Magazine — but Carlyla is the painting that announced her fully. On May 15, 2025, at the opening of The Bennett Prize 4 traveling exhibition at the Muskegon Museum of Art, Werntz was named the winner of the $50,000 Bennett Prize, selected from among more than 800 applicants by the competition's first all-woman jury. Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt, juror and co-founder of The Prize, put it simply at the time: Werntz's paintings are exquisitely executed, and they honor a group of people too often overlooked.
We think Carlyla will only grow more affecting with time—a painting that insists, quietly and without a trace of sentimentality, that a life fully lived deserves to be looked at fully. Werntz has said that a portrait is a way of telling the world someone was here, that they existed. Looking at her grandmother's face, rendered with this much patience and care, it's hard to disagree.
Image credit: Carlyla by Amy Werntz, Oil on Panel, 2024, 24" x 18"