Daniel Brice

California based artist Daniel Brice's mixed media canvases and works on paper are a study in the use of line and color to convey, through simple gestural movements, a complex world of ideas.

His most recent body of work are oil on paper geometric abstractions about the interplay of color and line used effectively to convey a sense of balance and imbalance. Where lines or colors converge, as they sometimes do, they become blurred as though disturbed by a momentary convergence. Ending abruptly when they intersect with either the hard-edge of a rectangular plane within the work or by the outer edge of the work itself, the lines require us to complete them or connect them, to see beyond what is there to what is not there.

For most of Brice’s career, geometric abstraction with a minimalist sensibility has dominated the imagery. For instance, brilliant large swaths of color, inspired by the Southern California light, and infinite ocean vistas, played the main roll in his previous Oxnard series. Brice brings the same approach, in terms of mark making, color and movement, to the Polaroid paintings. He’s plugging into a long history of still life painting, with the symbolism and beauty of rendering flowers, yet retaining the expansive power of large fields of color which dominate the picture plane and pull you into the “atmosphere” of the painting.

Daniel Brice is a nationally recognized artist who lives and works in Los Angeles and has exhibited widely. A recent inclusion in the Allentown Art Museum’s A Collecting Spirit: Gifts of Paul Kania exhibition featured dozens of Brice’s charcoal drawings, monoprints, and oil-on-paper works collected from Chiaroscuro over the last decade. Chiaroscuro has represented Brice’s work in Santa Fe since 2005 and Polariod Paintings is his fourth solo exhibition here.

Brice's work in charcoal and pastel is the result of painstaking attention to detail that involves a combination of dark, curved line work with hard-edged planes appearing almost as collage elements in each piece. These works incorporate subtle color in the curves and corners of each line.