Colin Brant: Life-size
Text by Bob Nickas
Every work of art, even those wholly abstract, are from life, and every work of art is life-size. The subject may be a redwood tree, which in the forest can rise to 380 feet high. Painted, photographed or drawn, the image of the tree may only be a matter of inches, and yet it is life-size to its support, to a sheet of paper, a canvas or a board, to an old postcard. Moreover it is life-size to the eye and the hand of the artist, as well as to the eye of the viewer.
A painting of Godzilla by Colin Brant is very intimately scaled, far from how the monster looms in the imagination or on a movie screen. Godzilla and painting have something in common. Both are fictions. Brant’s painting of the monster is, in fact, life-size. You may guess that it was painted from a toy. You would be wrong. The artist saw the image on the cover of a magazine in the supermarket. The painting is based on a photographic reproduction, as was much of the appropriation art of the 1980s. Colin Brant is not an appropriation artist. He, as is true the world over, has his sources, sources not always from life as understood by way of Impressionism. Any number of images to the contrary, he is not a plein-air painter. Although he may on rare occasion have gone out of his studio to paint, he is primarily studio-based. And no matter how his image appears to us, his subject is always and inevitably painting. And why did he paint Godzilla? That day on the checkout line, he had asked himself, “Can I make a painting of that?”
Most encountering Brant’s work initially would identify him as a landscape painter. He disagrees, not being contrarian, only to insist he’s after something else, something he himself finds hard to explain. He 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. The fact of his difficulty to articulate his narrative, and this is neither reluctance nor evasion, is actually helpful in drawing a bead on what he does. Simply stated, what we his viewers see as landscapes is more his own navigating of the terrain, topography, and contours of painting, memory and images and how they intertwine, and how he is relating—and this includes those places he has inhabited—the appearance of the world as seen in his mind’s eye, the act of bringing an image into being. Even a cursory examination of his sources shows that he makes these pictures more alive, vibrant, magical, and at times disorientingly so. The psychedelic, cavernous subterranean room that is Freedley Quarry #2, 2022, for example, might also be described as a spelunker’s hall of funhouse mirrors. In this Brant has something in common with writers whose first duty is to bring a story to life. And what is the painter’s? For both, in relating an actual event or location, the imperative is to make it more interesting, to heighten the experience for readers and viewers. To this end they inevitably intertwine fact and fiction.
When Brant shows us places where we have never been, where he himself hasn’t, he is takes us there, to the painted world. It is itself a map, one that allows him, and us, to get pleasurably lost. This is an artist, painting nearly every day, who often makes multiple variations of an image. Painting, ideally, is recurrent, without final destination. Even as the act of picture-making may be thought of as elliptical, the artist and his followers are never moving from A to B and back again. There is always something else to discover. The realist painter Lois Dodd, now 96, has returned to the same few locations and subjects over and again for the past seven decades—moving between Maine and the Delaware Water Gap, looking out her East Village window—and continues to find engagement. Maybe her picture of a snowy winter day isn’t about the landscape. Maybe it’s about an aloneness, different from loneliness, certainly. Painting, of course, is a solitary activity. It can be a meditation, for artist and viewer alike. The surface of a painting is not dissimilar to a surface of water. There is a mirroring of sky and light from above, peripheral reflection, a wondering of what lies below. To make a painting and to look at a painting share a sense of wonder and curiosity. Consider Colin Brant’s Aquarium, 2023. Observed in proximity, an aquarium is a contained world we put our heads into. The same is true of a painting, or can be. Every painting, no matter the image, is an aquarium of sorts. With Plankton, 2022, Minerals, 2021, and Flower Stand, 2022, Brant arrays everything before us to examine, as he himself has done, and this also holds true for images not directly based on display.
In certain paintings Brant suggests the point-of-view as that of the viewer, an unseen figure in the scene. Grotto, 2023, clearly places the viewer in the painting: on the inside looking out, the cave’s high archway framing the landscape beyond, offering a quietly magical, mystical image. Similarly, Houda Beach, 2022, in Northern California near to where the artist was raised, is framed by nature. In the foreground, left and right, up to the canvas’s midpoint, there are outcrops of grass and rocks; on both sides and along the top, branches with slender feathery leaves ring the inlet and the sea beyond. The viewer stands there, as he was when the source photograph was taken. Despite the vertical format, he moves the eye around a continuous circular path by way of the flow of the marks and serpentine lines at all four sides. This amplifies the sweet spot of the central view, just as it would if we had hiked to the edge of the cliff overlooking the bay, rewarded by the sublime view. More than landscapes, these are images of experiences, including those of the painter in their making. Brant’s painting Moonstone, 2022, which is a beach close to Houda, a near nocturne, might have been painted by Munch in the departure of Northern light, or by Mondrian in his early, revelatory mystic period. Nature, Mondrian knew well, was a spiritual realm. For Brant, “being there” may also encompass distance, and distance foreshortened, as when he transforms his photograph of a diorama in the American Museum of Natural History into an otherworldly vision of an exotic jungle primeval: Congo Forest Diorama AMNH, 2022. With his highly enlivened image, we no longer stand before an enclosed world, a museum simulation, on Central Park West and 79th Street in New York. Looking at his source photo, we more fully see how he has turned a mundane image into something entirely fantastical. Museum dioramas are meant to convey faraway locations or distant points in time as true-to-life, or real. Brant’s imagining of it feels much more actual for its heightened vision. When presented with the grandeur and strangeness of nature, with the sublime, or ridiculously sublime, many of us respond with a single word to convey our impression: Unreal!
Brant has painted numerous fjord scenes, all stunning, although he has never seen one in-person. To look out over a magnificent fjord, this is one place where sublimity resides. More than that, he has an abiding interest in the very creation of the earth, in the planet’s more wondrous, sculptural formations. He knows that the greatest sculptor is nature itself, and often refers in cosmic, microcosmic terms to how life on earth came to be. His 2023 exhibition, Dirty Snowball, borrows its title from the theory proposing 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 those early primordial swamps amino acids came together to build simple creatures, which turned into more complex creatures …” In the mountain paintings—appearing as clusters of geodes—Brant seems to want to show us what’s inside the stone, how it formed, layer upon layer. He has painted any number of scenes of Lake Louise, in Alberta’s Banff National Park, not only for its beauty and potential for painterly improvisation, but because it is a moraine lake. As such it refers, as fjords do, to glacial time and Earth’s last ice age. The lake’s waters, as rendered in Lake Louise, 2023, appear brilliantly turquoise due to particulate rock dust reflecting light from above. Even Brant’s leaving visible the canvas weave, and the feel of his pigment as at times granular, his color’s rubbed quality, all suggest sedimentary activity. In terms of chromatics, his greens may be described as derived from Chlorophyll, the natural compound in green plants, which gives them their coloration and enables them to absorb the sun’s energy through photosynthesis. From this they generate oxygen. It’s tempting to think of Brant’s work as engaging painting-synthesis, which in his process implicates photography. Far from being made obsolete by the invention of the medium, painting has since the 1820s pointed to the camera’s limitations, certainly of imagination. Of course today everyone takes pictures. Comparatively, very few can paint one.
People appear only infrequently in Brant’s paintings. While there are signs of built structures—a bridge, a house, a hotel—he may be suggesting a world unspoiled by human intervention, an idyllic environment, particularly as we inhabit a planet at greater risk, because of us, to cataclysm. When Brant does include a figure, he usually, by his own admission, hides them. In Mt Sir Donald, 2022, a figure is seated on a rock ledge at the canvas’s center baseline. The source was an old stereoscopic image (accounting for the left/right split that Brant has kept visible, except that it doesn’t bisect the sky), originally sepia, and in his painting greatly hued. The 19th century photographic technique, remarkable in its day, and still, approximates three-dimensional effect. In painting, however, Brant has no need to suggest the illusion of depth. Our depth perception for this image, a canvas measuring 34 by 45 inches (life-size), is a matter of painting’s fictive space, which we inhabit in the act of looking. Here, we grasp how art measures our proximity by degrees. The figure in this painting is small in relation to the vastness of nature and the universe, just as we are. Brant’s distance on the world and the world of images is not measurable in feet and inches. Distance allows him to make these paintings, and allows us to stay close to what he does. He animates and amplifies nature. “I’m not invested in a mountain, a landscape, Godzilla or fish tanks,” he has said, “but in the energies of the earth, glowing things, things that are real, primordial and alive.” He affirms over and again: “We see ourselves in the things we observe.”