Calvin Lai

Artist Statement

Painting is my diary. It holds things I’ve seen, places I’ve been, people I’ve met, and ideas about beauty. It’s a collection of moments that I interpret through my own visual language. As an artist with roots in classical realism, it has been important for me to paint accurately. But solely painting realism feels incomplete, and it can become a bit too academic. Instilling an emotional sensation within my pieces holds an equal amount of relevance. I want to make my audience feel that they are walking down a rainy street, climbing up a sun drenched hill, or sitting in front of a loved one. I want a viewer to feel the moments I collect.

The Work You See Today…

I get restless. Especially when it comes to my art. I have never been one to stick with one subject. Instead, throughout my life, I’ve been proactively painting anything that fascinates me, and what you see today is the result of my desire to capture everything through my brushes and paints. Though my subject matter changes, I approach each piece with the same artistic process; seeing, distorting, and reinterpreting, always starting with the large, general areas and then, like a camera focusing, zeroing in on the smaller, specific details that are most important (or the ones I want the viewer to see first). It’s my goal to create art with a similar visual look no matter what is being rendered.

For today though, I have three main bodies of work. The first comes from my recent series “Chroma 2”. Bold colors, dynamic brushwork, and expressive realism are some of the elements that are characteristic of my Chroma paintings. I am always trying to push how I see and interpret the figure, and these pieces gave me a rich palette to create from.

Recently, I set off on a California road trip at the beginning of April with the urge to find something I just couldn’t find at home. I took my paints and brushes and camped out on the cold mountains of the Los Padres, walked along the martian landscapes of the Alabama Hills and Joshua Tree, and relaxed by a rushing creek near the Yosemite area. All the while I painted, and the second body of work is what you see from my experience.

The third body of work typifies my fascination with bridging the gap between realism and expressive painting. These pieces span throughout my art career from the very beginning in 2011 to the present day!

Biography

Calvin Lai’s painting process is a mixture of seeing, distorting, and reinterpreting with threads of realism weaving the backdrop of where his artistic style is today. Calvin loved to draw when he was a child and to make a picture appear lifelike became his goal. Through constantly working, Calvin’s art began to breathe, and his fascination with value and perspective blossomed. Eventually, he moved from where he grew up in Los Angeles to San Francisco. There he studied drawing and printmaking at San Francisco State University. In 2008, he enrolled in the Academy of Art for illustration, but began painting instead. He found that he preferred the fine arts over commercial illustration, and now works as a full time oil painter.

Since then he has continued to develop and refine his oil painting skills. Lai’s work has been shown nationally in galleries, group exhibitions and juried shows. He has executed a large number of commissioned portraits over the past several years, and his paintings have appeared in national and international publications. His recent work has returned to a serious study of the figure, which has always been the anchor for his creative drive. His goal has gone beyond mere technical interpretation to a deeper sense of what the energy of the figure feels like. This goal has also carried over into his recent landscapes, still lifes, and cityscapes

Art Medium(s)

Oil Paint