Brian Kosoff

During the Covid lockdown my wife and I got exercise by taking long walks in our hometown of Portland Oregon. During these excursions I noticed a recurring phenomenon, graffiti that had been painted over, and frequently painted over many times creating different shapes and colors. The resulting image which looked like an abstract expressionist cross between Rothko and Diebenkorn added life to otherwise bland structures. These unintentional collaborations between the graffiti artist and the building maintenance people could go unnoticed by most. But I saw it as a tug of war between one person’s self-expression and another’s rights to their property. It added personality and visual interest where there otherwise would have been none. I decided to create a series of images of these works while they still existed, as they could disappear or change with a fresh coat of paint.

I admit I became fascinated and a bit obsessed with finding them. My constant head swiveling search for them had another effect on me, it rekindled my appreciation of manmade landscape.

Over the course of several years, I photographed more than a hundred of these abstract scenes adding other cities to the series. In some instances, I cropped closely wanting them to appear purely as a painting. For others I included their environment which I viewed as kind of an art installation photograph.

My intention is to produce prints that would confuse the line between a painting and a photograph. Maybe I’m just a frustrated painter at heart, but I want my photography to somehow go beyond being a document, to be something more pictorial.

The portfolio included here is but a small part of the work in this series, one of eight different series that I currently am working on. I cast a wide net with the work I pursue because as I grow as an artist I find more things of interest. To me it’s all a work in progress.