Erik Olson – Striking and Dynamic Art
Erik Olson is a painter born in Calgary, Canada. He is a graduate of Emily Carr University in Vancouver, citing influences from Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach. Olson makes a study of the effective ordering of parts. He creates striking, dynamic and expressionistic portraits. While painting stylistically and technically brilliant imagery, he uses fat brush strokes and sharp contrasts of colour and texture. The artist found his inspiration in different cultures. He spent six months travelling the entire subcontinent on his motorcycle, gathering material for his work and indulging his taste for discovery. “Now I feel much more intimately connected with a bigger world,” he says. After travelling, he was looking for a subject that would calm him down and expand his sense of reality. So he pointed his old telescope at the Moon and found a way to begin understanding the larger orders at the planetary scale. He created beautiful paintings of our planets using bright colours and broad brush-strokes.
