Brian Lotti celebrates the commonplace in his personable paintings

Brian Lotti is a name you may recognise from his skateboarding career in the 80s and 90s. However over the last number of years Brian has been painting in Los Angeles, using “varied swathes of vibrant colour, quick staccatos and heavy impasto strokes to create urban landscapes that capture the spontaneity of light and movement in his immediate environment”.

Brian’s interest in landscapes grew from his career as a skateboarder and filmmaker, celebrating “the commonplace alleys and streets with which he has been so intimately familiar”. Painting a variation of sporting activities or figures lazing in the park in his area of Echo Park, Brian’s works extenuate brush marks in a scratchy texture that communicate immediacy. The result is a collection of personable paintings, areas that you can picture the artist within, making sketches and building upon ideas later with paint.

Most recently Brian exhibited a show, Park Life, at HVW8 Gallery in Berlin. The exhibition displayed the artist’s interpretation of Los Angeles, “home to a famous sky that attracted both the entertainment industry and a myriad of West Coast landscape painters because of the quality of light”. Each of the paintings were created using a process of “distillation and colour mixing based on memory, photographs and sketches”. By using colour and texture vividly Brian’s paintings transform the familiar into “a dreamscape in which to enter,” says the gallery. “Oranges and purples meet rather than collide; swimming pool scenes offered in both day and night render the subject immutable; tennis players run on pink and blue courts with violet mountains in the distance; surfers ride crisp and deep blue waves with a hot orange beach in the foreground.”

The exhibition and Brian’s work as a whole offer a moment of pause, or reflection, on daily moments we pass without stopping to appreciate. “Individuals seem to inhabit a ruminating space in these paintings where the landscapes and light act as both diversion and co-conspirator.”