Studio life in yellows
Brian Lotti
Just for you and for the first time in PERSONA on paper, limited edition silkscreen print by BRIAN LOTTI, get it!
Studio life in yellows
9 color screenprint, December 2024
Studio days begin with a still life or portrait drawing to warm up the mind and loosen the arms. Roadside sunflowers grow year round where I live and are so common that they’ve become the recurring center of many of these drawings. Bright and lyrical, the wild flowers are always a challenge and a delight to draw and a whole universe of things ends up crowding in and around them. Tennis balls, coffee cups, lemons, preparatory drawings, and studio tools clutter the shelf and walls surrounding the flowers and find their place in the composition. The drawings become a record of what was happening that day or week in the studio. I became fascinated with the different yellow colors in these recurring tableaus and decided to go one step further than the back India ink drawings and create a color screenprint to suggest what felt compelling about this scene.
This 9 color print is on one level a still life distilled to an essence, and on another level it’s become a symbolic meditation on the creative life. Tennis balls express the joy and repetition in trial and error and razor blades strewn across the table are the many exacting, often difficult acts, that one must perform in furtherance of the craft and career. Lemons are the challenges and opportunities that present themselves to us for transformation and growth, and no good artist can survive without the dark fuel of coffee or espresso. A bottle of spirits (mezcal) stand in for inspiration and the muses, which draw from our experiences and observations (sleeping figure study on the wall) to create the great work (the sunflowers). My hope is that these prints will be a joy to live with and that they can inspire other people’s appreciation for the potential and beauty in their own daily lives.
Brian Lotti is a painter based in Los Angeles. Lotti often sketches outdoors for source material, plein-air, and uses varied swathes of vibrant color, quick staccatos, and heavy impasto strokes to form alleys, figures, horizons, color blocked houses on hills, and feathery trees to capture the spontaneity of atmosphere, light, and movement in the immediate environment. Lotti’s longtime involvement with skateboarding, as a pro rider and later filmmaker, has allowed him to contextualize the shift of the skater from anti-establishment aggressor to one who is intimately connected to the urban landscape; fully aware of and at peace with its oppression and its liberation. In like ways, a skateboarder steeped in recreation and observation, is hypersensitive to the street as an aesthetic subject concerned with translating physicality, sensuality, and emotions. Lotti uses the language of Expressionism and Impressionism to describe the fleeting, dynamic, and visceral experience of urban landscapes. In so doing, he proposes a perhaps unintentional, but novel assertion that these (now) dated practices of Impressionism and Expressionism are direct, intuitive responses to notions of movement, youth, presentness, vigor, subjectivity, and urbanity. Lotti graduated with a BA from San Francisco State University in 1998 and has exhibited nationally and internationally. His work has been collected in North America, Europe, and Japan.
PRINT DETAILS
9 color, analog screenprint on Stonehenge paper
25.75 x 19.75 inches
65 x 50 cm
Edition of 40
*frame is not included