COLIN BRANT | Paintings _ Exhibitions _ Writing _ About _ Contact _ @colinbrant724
Colin Brant makes oil paintings on canvas spanning in scale from handheld to the width of his outstretched arms. 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.
Brant’s subjects include animals, minerals, celestial phenomenon, and landscape is a recurring motif. A certain range in the Canadian Rockies and Crater Lake in Oregon have been the subjects of series of paintings. Using a variety of vintage postcards which show the landscapes from slightly different angles with different light and color situations, the paintings become a study of mutability and subjectivity. No matter the subject, things are constantly in flux or shifting between one state and another. Mountains 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 he is painting plankton or a vast fjord, the work becomes a meditative exploration of how he sees and understands the natural world.
Brant was the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2022 and has received grants from New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Solo exhibitions include Europa Gallery (New York) , Dutton Gallery (New York), Platform Project Space (New York), Galleria Richter (Rome, Italy) Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson, New York), Adam Baumgold Gallery (New York), and Beth Urdang Gallery (Boston), and numerous group exhibitions including James Cohan Gallery, Steven Zevitas Gallery, Lucien Terras, Geoffrey Young Gallery, and Platform Space. He attended the University of California Santa Cruz and The University of Iowa and currently lives and works in North Bennington, VT and Brooklyn, NY.
