Evan Nesbit

Evan Nesbit's paintings are abstract color fields, capturing a performative gesture in the process of distributing paint and pigments to stain, bleach, coat, and color textiles and objects. Some of the paintings are achromatic, made with small amounts of pigment dispersed in acrylic, others oversaturated in bright monochrome fluorescence. For his paintings, Nesbit often uses pressure and gravity to push paint between the fibers of natural dyed burlap causing the synthetic pigment material to press through the fabric and dry. Through this formal inversion, the paint becomes a substrate and the burlap fabric a foregrounded image, giving equal visual importance to both while marking the presence of a painter and the process of manipulating a panel. Nesbit works within the tradition of American impressionism, color field painting, minimalism and post-minimalism as well as European movements such as Arte Povera or Supports/Surfaces. As such, he is deeply committed to studying and utilizing potentials and properties of natural and synthetic materials with regards to their aesthetic qualities as well as the past conditions and experiences imbued within them. Nesbit's works function as paintings by formally reordering substrates, creating a sense of light and space by foregrounding the texture and weight of supports and surfaces. Evan Nesbit (*1985 in California) lives and works in Grass Valley, California. Nesbit received his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2009 and his MFA from Yale University in 2012. A recipient of the Yale University Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Fund Prize for painting, his work has been covered in the Los Angeles Times, New American Paintings, and Flash Art.