Clayton Colvin

Colvin has developed a practice of painting that is both challenging and seductive, using a hybrid of figurative and abstract approaches to create delicate, fantastic, and concrete spaces - the immediate and intimate nature of drawing infusing his paintings with an hypnotic mix of familiarity and mystery. The artist’s recent work continues what critic Cinque Hicks described in Art in America as his “naked search for new answers to old questions.”
Colvin’s subtlety and dexterity comes from a decade-long interrogation of the practices and processes of drawing and painting. Having the capacity to represent the onslaught of technology against the resistance of history is an element of the Zen-like approach to Colvin’s studio practice. Works such as A New Memory (shown hereunder), contrasts the suggestion of the ubiquitous pixel, with its square shape, against the deep, blue depths of the picture’s plane. Colvin lays what seems to be the process on the surface, with visible brushstrokes, but his works are always far more complex, layered and multifaceted, revealing how they have been constructed only upon a close, intimate, personal inspection.