Surface by Calie Durant

Acrylic on canvas, mounted to wood cradled panel - framed in walnut-toned aluminum
20" h x 20" w painting - framed at 21" h x 21" w x 1.5" d
Professionally wired and ready to hang

Calie Durant is an abstract painter whose work bridges a lifelong dedication to visual communication with a sustained commitment to a practice shaped through layered inquiry and revision. She studied graphic design in art school before earning her BFA with a major in painting. Raised in Hawai‘i, she was drawn early to the relationships between color, form, and atmosphere, sensitivities that would later inform both her design career and her studio practice.

Before turning fully toward painting, Calie worked in branding and advertising as an art director, designer, and strategist in New York and San Francisco. She led creative teams and crafted cohesive visual systems across web, mobile, and print. During this time, she partnered with renowned clients including Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma, Ogilvy & Mather, and Landor Associates. This background refined her approach to composition, structure, and visual clarity, elements that now underpin the disciplined yet expansive nature of her abstract work.

In 2021, Calie moved back to O‘ahu with her husband and two children. She now paints from her home studio in Honolulu, where a sense of rhythm, openness, and spatial awareness informs the ongoing evolution of her practice.

Surface explores what lives just beneath the visible. Layers of earthy greens, soft blues, warm clay, and muted golds overlap and shift, creating a sense of movement and quiet depth. Subtle texture runs throughout the painting, catching light differently as the day changes and revealing details that are difficult to capture in a photograph.

This work invites slow looking. Forms emerge and recede, suggesting landscapes, maps, or memories without settling into a fixed narrative. The surface holds evidence of process, scraped back passages, built-up paint, and softened edges, giving the piece a tactile, dimensional presence. In person, the color relationships and texture feel richer and more nuanced than in photographs. - Calie Durant