Clayton Colvin - Maus Contemporary

"Fragility and ephemerality are guiding principles in Clayton Colvin's art. Playing with pattern and perception to address these concepts, Colvin creates loose, geometric imagery that combines drawing, painting, and textiles. In fact, Colvin does not distinguish between drawing and painting and purposefully shifts from one to the other in abstract works that fluctuate from formal to expressive. With subtle and playful sense of humor, the artist puts humanity at the center of his work. He explains, "I am interested in feelings, flawed and visceral. I am fragile. I am amazed. I am thankful. It is dirty stuff. It is human. It plays sometimes at control and pixel perfection, and its failure reveals the exact element I want to express.

Merging painted brushstrokes with drawn marks while adding and erasing layers, Colvin finds inspiration in how we consume images, often now mediated through cell phone cameras (...) he deconstructs everyday patterns and digitization found in technology to its base shapes and colors to focus on movement and energy in works that become transcendent."

- Jennifer Jankauskas, Curator of Art, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

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 for new way to forget 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 The Nursery (shown above), 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. Rowan Ricardo Phillips, writing for Artforum, commented “ (...) At times, painting seems to give way to drawing, and at other times, drawing seems to give way to painting. Erasures and additions reveal and conceal other layers, complicating ideas of before and after, original and addition, right side up and upside down. The paintings thrive in paradox: They can seem crowded and full of movement, a sense of unsettled energy populating their spaces; after sustained viewing, however, a calm and measured contemplativeness saturates the canvases. (...) The paintings seem to move when you don’t look at them and stand still when you do - each striving to represent both the noise in which contemporary life finds itself ensnared, and the quiet meditation that can free it.”

Clayton Colvin (b. 1976) lives and works in Birmingham, AL. He received his BA in Art History from New York University in 1999 and his MFA in painting from the University of Alabama in 2005. Colvin’s work has been exhibited by galleries and museums across the US including the Birmingham Museum of Art (Birmingham, AL); the Mobile Museum of Art (Mobile, AL); and Artist Space (New York, NY). Recent solo exhibitions include Margaret Thatcher Projects (New York, NY); Launch F18 (New York, NY); the University of Montevallo (Montevallo, AL); the University of Memphis Art Museum (Memphis, TN); and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Montgomery, AL).

Colvin’s work is included in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA), the Birmingham Museum of Art (Birmingham, AL), and the Mobile Museum of Art (Mobile, AL).

Reviews of his work have appeared in Art in America, Artforum.com, San Francisco Arts Quarterly, and ArtPapers, amidst others.