About Brian Evjenth


Among the fifteen artists exhibiting at the gallery is Brian Evjenth. Brian specializes in very colorful and large acrylic paintings. Brian Evjenth’s statement: “I am a native of San Franciscan who received my formal education at first at Cal Arts, right out of high school, and then transferred to the prestigious and chaotic San Francisco Art Institute where I was accepted in the painting and sculpture programs. My education at SFAI was a complete success, for it was there that I learned not only discipline, deconstruction, and technique, but more importantly the philosophy of continuing to question, continuing learning on my own, and creating work that was not an extension of the European tradition but still looks good . With that spirit in mind, my current work, which can be grouped into two types,” color paintings” and “symbol paintings”, it is easier to read the color paintings. Volumes can and have been said about our relationship with color, their ability to raise emotion, and their ability to heal. There are two things that all the color paintings have in common. 1) They are ambiguous enough so that the color can “do all the talking” without some other image distracting from the content, and 2) it’s easier to read them if you think of the colors as sounds, or visual representations of music. The symbol paintings: The idea of a spinning propeller whose blades are moving so fast they look like they are standing still is a good image for the way I hope the symbol paintings are received i.e. a lot of information reduced to as simple a form as I can get it without it losing it’s openness to the archetypical. They all share a straightforwardness that makes them easy to “enter and exit” and re-enter.