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Colin Brant: Dirty Snowball, Dutton Gallery, New York, NY, September 18 – October 15 2023, accompanying artist book with text by Bob Nickas
In 1949 Harvard College Observatory astronomer Fred Lawrence Whipple proposed the ‘Dirty Snowball’ theory. His idea was that the building blocks of all life (as well as most of the water) came to earth in the form of giant balls of ice, rock, and dust (comets), that collided with our planet eons ago. In these early primordial swamps, amino acids came together to build simple lifeforms, which turned into more complex lifeforms including fish, flowers, saber tooth tigers, humans, and every other living creature.
Colin Brant makes oil paintings on canvas that respond to this theory by showcasing a variety of plants and animals and their habitats. Aquariums are containers for creatures and reflect us looking in. We see ourselves in the things we observe. Mountain landscapes fracture and dissolve in light, animals appear then vanish, reflections turn a landscape upside down, everything is in transformation and slipping between the recognizable and fantastical. Whether the subject is plankton or glacier carved peaks, the painting becomes a meditative exploration of how he sees and understands the natural world.
Beginning with thin washes of color, the pigment deposits in the grooves of the weave and emphasizes the texture of the fabric. Using reference materials such as linen postcards and 19th century colorized stereoscope images, the layered colors are reminiscent of these old printing methods. Overlapping tones of dusty pinks and violets tinged with orange suggest things seen through grainy atmospheric distance as well as across the distance of time. Scumbled marks of thicker paint over these thinner layers coalesce into images. Brant is inspired by artists who use representation as a starting point for the imagination to wander, including Post Impressionists like Pierre Bonnard, early American self-taught artists, and Chinese landscape painters.
