Brian Batt

Partially inspired by photorealist painters such as Chuck Close and pattern-obsessed Pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Sigmar Polke, artist Brian Batt blends high aesthetics and technique with low culture. Batt has appropriated the technique of gridding, applying it to reproduced images taken from the Internet. The pixilated photos feature a variety of subjects, such as portraits of David Bowie, Dash Snow, and Mark Rothko, along with still lifes and trompe l’oeil. Batt’s 2014 colored pencil drawing, Rose Pixel Sketch, for example, depicts a gridded square, filled in by hand with a variety of pinks, oranges, reds, and greens to form the angular icon of a rose.