Colin Brant at Spritz3000

Colin Brant
(b. 1965) based in North Bennington, Vermont and Brooklyn, New York

Oil on canvas
60 × 50 in.

Colin Brant’s Kreidefelsen (German for “chalk cliffs”) offers a vertiginous view from above, where trees frame a distant shoreline and cliffs dissolve into shifting bands of color. The title recalls the famed Kreidefelsen auf Rügen painted by Caspar David Friedrich, situating Brant’s work within a lineage of Romantic landscape while reimagining it for the present. Thin washes of pigment create a luminous ground, through which scuffled strokes suggest the play of light across water and stone. The painting hovers between observation and invention: forms appear precise yet slip toward abstraction. Brant captures not only the terrain itself but the sensation of looking—how distance, atmosphere, and time mediate vision, transforming landscape into a meditation on impermanence.

Colin Brant (b. 1965, Arcata, California) makes oil paintings that transform archival images and atmospheric fragments into expansive meditations on perception and time. Working on canvases that range from the handheld to the span of his outstretched arms, Brant begins with thin washes of color that settle into the weave of the fabric, evoking the textures of vintage linen postcards or 19th-century colorized stereoscope prints. Overlapping tones of dusty pinks, violets, and orange conjure distance both spatial and temporal, while scumbled layers of thicker paint gradually coalesce into images. Landscapes often anchor his compositions, yet animals, minerals, and celestial phenomena also recur, each subject caught in flux—mountains dissolve into light, reflections invert horizons, and forms slip between recognition and invention. Inspired by artists from Pierre Bonnard to early American self-taught painters and Chinese landscape traditions, Brant employs representation as a threshold for imagination. He is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and has also received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include solo shows at Europa Gallery, New York, and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Brant lives and works in North Bennington, Vermont, and Brooklyn, New York.