Colin Brant makes oil paintings on canvas, in a range of sizes from handheld to the scale 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 19 th 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 isinspired 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.
Although landscape is a recuring motif, there are a variety of subjects that he paints including animals, minerals, and celestial phenomenon. A certain range in the Canadian Rockies has been the subject of a series of paintings. Using a variety of vintage postcards which show the range 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 the subject is plankton or a vast fjord, the painting becomes a meditative exploration of how he sees and understands the natural world.
