Brian Calvin
“Waiting”
New York, 16 East 55th Street
Life as a painter in Ojai, California, is solitary. The isolation of the Ojai Valley provides a lifestyle that dovetails nicely with Calvin’s daily painting process. However with the forced suspension of his routine due to the lockdown, isolation took on a new meaning. It presented time to reexamine self-imposed boundaries in his work, including what it means to paint a figure.
Calvin turned a corner as he developed ideas for paintings in his sketchbook, giving himself permission to propose things in a picture that don’t make sense. Activating techniques from synthetic Cubism, he played freely with color, texture, viewpoint, and plane, bringing spontaneity and urgency to his images. His newly unfettered imagery broke through naturalism and entered the unreal.
Time is at once objectively and subjectively measurable. A person’s reflection in a mirror is similar. During a prolonged period of precarity, the interior comes into focus and is ripe for distortion. In works such as Delayed Reaction and Composite Sketch, there is a sense of motion blur or double vision, each face having two cascading sets of eyes and lips. In Composite Self and Passing Thoughts, forlorn faces with five o’clock shadows (possible stand-ins for the painter) allude to mortality and the passage of time.
through December 5, 2020
