About

Through expansive vivid color, fragmented line, and diversity in scale, these paintings portray the self in myriad ways. Combining realism with abstraction, layering and constructing, Olson balances the empirical characteristics of the sitter with a search for the spiritual.

There is a mask-like or illusory quality to many of these paintings. From the solid fields of colour to the floral looping lines of face-paint to the pictograms on a tattooed back, Olson covers or conceals the identity of each sitter: the mask framing the architecture of the face. In this new work, he plays with what is …