Brian Calvin
Painting the in-between
“I’m always looking for ‘the soul’ in the painting that I can connect to. If I can feel it, someone else can feel it.”
Brian Calvin creates close-up portraits and landscapes. He fragments his subjects, exploring the line between figuration and abstraction. Faces appear mosaic-like and androgynous, with several often appearing on the same canvas. Calvin draws and paints, working with coloured pencils and pastels on paper, or acrylics on canvas and linen. His use of colour is flat yet luminous, with a cartoonish appeal. The exaggeration of his characters' eyes add to this effect, while their glossy lips and fingernails are reminiscent of makeup ads. His work combines elements of Pop Art and Cubism, as well as bu...
Brian Calvin creates close-up portraits and landscapes. He fragments his subjects, exploring the line between figuration and abstraction. Faces appear mosaic-like and androgynous, with several often appearing on the same canvas. Calvin draws and paints, working with coloured pencils and pastels on paper, or acrylics on canvas and linen. His use of colour is flat yet luminous, with a cartoonish appeal. The exaggeration of his characters' eyes add to this effect, while their glossy lips and fingernails are reminiscent of makeup ads. His work combines elements of Pop Art and Cubism, as well as buried references to Giotto, Piero della Francesca and Philip Guston, who helped the artist imagine painting as a viable means of communication: "he was speaking to the times without being so direct or literal".
Calvin resists making paintings with a narrative by depicting moments of relative inactivity. The subjects gaze out of the canvas, generally doing nothing - a stereotype of the Californian lifestyle. Many of his exhibitions have titles relating to time: 'Days', 'More Days', 'Hours' and 'Waiting'. As such, he bestows each painting with a strange temporality. Every figure seems caught in a moment of listlessness. This only became more pertinent with the pandemic, as it seemed to create a universal slowing down. Calvin captures unique “in-between” moments, stopping the clock and painting pauses.
Brian Calvin was born in 1969 in Visalia, California. He now lives and works in Ojai, California.
Brian Calvin discovered art through music. He says, “music was the prism through which I could imagine a life spent making art”. Having spent his younger years in bands, many of his favourite artists are, in fact, musicians.
His work forms part of many public collections across the USA. In Los Angeles alone, his paintings can be found in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA).
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