We all remember the famous scene from the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind where the main character John Nash is scrawling mathematical proofs on the window of the library at Princeton University that eventually come to life to haunt and inspire him. The immediacy, compulsion and free-flow of his mind, as represented in this abstraction of the creative process, though over-romanticized and for several reasons problematic, is akin to the experience one has taking in Colvin's work. His visual maps mark the terrain of ideas, showing us the way the mind thinks through problems, environments and copes with the distractions of the everyday. At times these paintings seem to have a razor focus, but at the same time they appear to chart the mind as it drifts into another thought, daydream or becomes preoccupied by the interjection of life. The focus, when present, is not unlike the clarity an athlete speaks about while in the midst of a long run. It waxes and wanes, but that is exactly what makes this work so very intriguing.

We experience in these works the complex workings of the mind and the conflation of interior and the exterior, a striving to reach that point of clarity and an acceptance that at times you can still see through that library window, through the structural artifice of rational thought, into the beautiful chaos of daily existence. Colvin’s work is an attempt to come to terms with the multitude of experiences we deal with day to day; a way of gaining insight, a way of understanding the present as much as it is about pictorial space and issues surrounding abstraction. (...)”

- Brian Bishop, excerpt from TAMING THE UNCONTROLLABLE (Maus Contemporary publication "Clayton Colvin: Space Mountain”, 2011)