About (me)

BennyTheBlueMeanie (Benjamin Paseltiner, b. 2001, United States) is an artist and supply chain engineer from New City, New York currently living in Nashville, Tennessee. A lover of the arts, music in every register, food that carries stories, cultures that travel through people, and experiences that leave lasting memories. Raised by two educators, Benjamin grew up valuing achievement and intellectual rigor. After pursuing careers in finance and later supply chain engineering, he found himself materially comfortable but emotionally disconnected from his work. This art practice emerged as a way to unlearn an over-identification with productivity and wealth, and to reorient toward beauty, care, and presence. The works created reflect this ongoing effort to locate meaning outside of economic success. 

What began as a small passion project has become an open channel for his innermost thoughts, desires, truths, ordeals, realities, and more. The choice to work with currency is not a trick or a novelty. It is a deliberate response to the world we share. The symbolism in landing on money as material is ironic, beautifully clandestine, and quietly poetic. Banknotes arrive with histories already printed into them, portraits and patterns and promises. In Benjamin’s hands they become a new grammar made from color, fiber, and line.

His professional training maps systems, routes, constraints, lead times, and links that are easy to miss. That discipline carries into the studio. Notes from distant places are sorted and read like terrain. Fragments are cut, layered, and pressed into forms that ask how value is made and where value lives. The work sits at the seam between the extrinsic and the intrinsic, between what can be priced and what must be felt. That question has been a decade long meditation and, at times, a private battle. This vocation gives the question a shape, and in that shaping gives it grace.

Across the body of work runs a steady intention. Benjamin aims to leave weaving strands of love, peace, and compassion inside every piece. Countries speak to countries. Cultures meet cultures. Themes that once stood apart are asked to sit together. The result is an object that holds through texture, visual appeal, meaning, and value. Up close there are small negotiations where colors reconcile and motifs find common ground. From a distance a larger harmony appears, something that feels inevitable once you see it.

Each collage is both an offering and an inquiry. It is a record of where the materials have been and a proposal for where we might go. Tender becomes a kind of tenderness. Borders soften into pattern. The familiar utility of a bill is recast as a vessel for memory, attention, and care. Under the name bennythebluemeanie, Benjamin Paseltiner works to turn what we share into something we can keep, and to turn what we keep into something we can share.

Love is all we need