"The slender young people Brian Calvin paints
look as if they were lifted from a teenage cartoonist's sketchbook. They
have comically long faces, oversize heads, huge lips, stringy hair, big
eyes with reflections carefully noted, and vacant, vaguely depressed
expressions.
Because of the cartoon style
and the disaffected moods of his subjects, this Los Angeles-based artist
has been called a slacker. The label is wrong, though, because he pays
assiduous attention to the formal dimensions of his medium. The way he
flattens, simplifies and crops his figures and their Southern California
backgrounds and his use of richly saturated colors has earned him
comparison with Alex Katz and David Hockney. It does appear that he is
at once emulating and parodying those painters, and the effect is
amusing."NYT
