American b. 1972  —  Brian Lotti is a Los Angeles based painter. 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, vigor, subjectivity, and urbanity. Lotti graduated with a BA from San Francisco State University in 1998 and has exhibited nationally and internationally. He has lived and work in Los Angeles and New York City, and done Artist residencies in Marfa, Texas and Bozeman, Montana. His work has been collected in the US, Europe, and Japan.

Brian Lotti, Influences

December 10, 2021

I skateboarded a lot as a teenager and moved to southern California to go to college and work in the skateboarding industry.  I spent a lot of time around visually oriented people like graphic designers, and eccentric photographers and also filmmakers.   Skateboarding was a physical activity, but it was also a very aesthetic pursuit. Composition was everything as the culture was recorded and transmitted through photography and filmmaking.  I enrolled in a photo class at school and got hooked on making my own compositions.  Early on, the black and white photography of artists like Lee Friedlander, Dorothea Lange, and Gary Winogrand was really inspiring. Then I landed a stint with an upstart skateboarding magazine, “Big Brother”. This afforded me access to free color film and processing. I was taking color photos of skateboarding and moonlighting on the side shooting self-portraits and street scenes and portraits of friends. 

My new passion for color photography led to a curiosity about painting and using color (oil paints) as a material.  After painting experimentally for a year or two I began to train my interest on making small landscapes. I was documenting places like buildings or meadows or things that seemed meaningful for whatever reason. This fledgling landscape painting practice led to an interest in so much late 19th century painting; I was excited about everything from the impressionists to Cezanne to the post impressionists. I moved to the foothills of the Sierra mountains after college and worked odd jobs and painted smallish landscapes and bad portraits while doing landscaping work and odd jobs. At some point I discovered the work of the contemporary, photo-based painters Gerhard Richter and Marlene Dumas. These painter’s works opened up a world of possibilities for me. The idea that photos could serve as a tool for inspiration and also a departure into painting.

Eventually I returned to living in Southern California and discovered the work of contemporary New York figurative artists like Peter Doig, Alex Katz, and Kathy Bradford. I also become keenly interested in the sun drenched pools and colorful landscapes of David Hockney and Jules DeBalincourt. My initial experience as a landscape painter expanded to a greater interest in figure painting in general and a more subjective use of color and materials.