When first seeing Brendan Cass’s paintings, you’ll know you are looking at the work of someone who is very free.  Color swoops across huge surfaces, tenuously resolving itself into luminous landscapes.  When I dropped by his studio he was freshly back from a trip to Spain.  Brendan was laughing in this pic because Bebe, his cat, kept running in front of the camera.

Some of Brendan’s landscapes are loosely based around photos of seaside towns.  “I don’t really paint accurately.  I just use suggestions of images as an excuse to paint.”

“Your sense of perception feels filled.  Your memory doesn’t have a region to place the painting.”

Bebe sprinting away from “Akureyri.”  To give you an idea of scale, this painting is roughly six feet tall and twelve feet wide.

Source imagery wall.

Brendan is a masterful colorist.  Photos don’t really do this work justice, because in person the color is translucent.

The paint cart.  The way another painter arranges the paint is very sexy, like getting an unexpected glimpse of panties or a nipple.  It’s so tactile and colorful.

Brendan uses little store bought canvases to try out color combos, he referred to this as a palette.

A very beautiful table with blue velvet underneath glass, on it are family mementos and crystals.  While we were looking at the table, he told a funny story about Brian Belott.  Brendan had come home from a trip to Barcelona with two blue sodium crystals, you can see one of the crystals at about 10 o’clock on the table.  When he took them out of the bag they were dusty.  So he washed one off in the sink, but it started to melt – because sodium is just salt.  So, having been friends for years, Brendan knew Belott really likes crystals; he gave the melted crystal to him.  Brian was like “what the fuck, you give me a melted crystal!”  Brendan was laughing when he said Brian was really pissed about it. 

Donald Baechler drawing.

Chris Martin drawing of Joseph Bueys.

A nice Brian Belott collage.