Colin Brant

Colin Brant

Brant’s paintings begin with thin washes of color, the pigment deposits in the grooves of the weave. 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 violet and 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. Though Brant hikes himself to find his vistas, he reveres artists who use representation as a starting point for the imagination to wander, including Post Impressionists like Pierre Bonnard, and early American self-taught artists.

Brant has said that his paintings aren’t “pictures of places,” even as they refer to locations he knows, where he’s from and is now, along with others he has never visited. You don’t have to go to a place to paint it. You go to a place in your mind. Maybe those paintings of where he’s never been are visitations. There can be a reversal of polarity: we don’t go to a place; the place comes to us. The place Brant goes to is painting.

— Bob Nickas, Colin Brant: Life-size