Since the 1990s, Brian Calvin has developed his distinctive figurative, non-narrative, pictorial style. Landscapes and portraits steeped in his Californian roots dominate his work. Close-up treatment of subjects, highly composed structures, and luminous colors laid flat endow these large-scale paintings with a strange temporality. In observing his technique of pictorial economy, one gradually comes to see a type of abstraction in his representation of certain details.