About The Rushmore Family
The Rushmore Family
A growing family of strange faces, drawn one at a time in black ink and painted large on canvas. Each one is an original, made by hand. Here is what they are, how they come to be, and how to take one home.
A family of strangers
Every face in the Rushmore Family is a one-off. They are meant to be a little grotesque, and the longer you look the more they seem to look back. None of them set out to be a family. They just kept arriving, year after year, until there were enough to fill a wall.
Bent started drawing them around 2010, almost as a kind of therapy, a way to slow down. We have all doodled in the margins while waiting for something, and his began the same way. Then the shapes turned into faces, and the faces would not stop.
“When I draw I drop into a strange kind of flow. For long stretches I am completely in the moment, and the noisy, worried thoughts leave me alone. I can just be, and really listen to what is going on around me. That is why there is always a little sketchbook in my bag, and why people keep catching me drawing in cafés.”
How the drawings are made
The faces have been drawn in cafés in Tallinn, Pärnu and Berlin, in Estonian forests and on its beaches, and in plenty of stranger places life has carried Bent to. The recipe never changes:
- One black Pilot ballpoint pen, nothing fancier.
- A small Moleskine Art sketchbook, 120 gsm paper, about 10 by 15 cm.
- The torn top edge and soft rounded corners are the sketchbook’s doing, not ours.
- Every drawing is a single original. None of them is ever reprinted.
From a sketchbook to a wall
In 2018 the Estonian artist Martin Saar hung the family in his Tallinn gallery and picked Bent as one of the emerging names that year. Since then the faces have found homes on walls and cupboard tops around Estonia and well beyond it.
The family so far
New faces keep arriving, almost by the day. Scroll the row, or click any one to look closer.
Onto canvas
In 2026 the faces grew up. Bent moved to paint, blowing the same unearthly portraits up to wall size while keeping the raw, hand-drawn line intact. Monochrome and deliberately unsettling, they are made to start a conversation, and to make you feel something.
The paintings are worked in acrylic on canvas, in black and white only, so nothing pulls your eye away from the line. They come in two sizes: an intimate 40 by 60 cm, and a wall-filling 80 by 120 cm. Like the drawings, each canvas is a single original, painted and signed by hand, never reprinted.
The canvases so far. Scroll the row, or click any one to look closer.
Bring one home
Every piece here is the only one of its kind, whether it is a framed ink drawing or a painting on canvas. Find a face you like, and you can take it home, ready to hang.
Questions, interviews, fan mail, or anything at all: write to hello@bentrushmore.com. For logos and photos, see the press kit.
Where to next
See it, hear it.