By Kendall GibsonCOLUMNIST

I first heard of Brandon Chivers through a friend I’ll call Maggie. Maggie is a person who pushed me to be creative and she is also my good friend. So, when she said that Brandon is a good person and artist I knew it was likely true.

For this review I met Chivers for the first time outside Bits & Bytes cafe. I picked him out pretty easily I must say, armed only with his Facebook picture. Although it definitely would have been easier to let him know I was a 6’3” skinny guy with bleach-blond hair. But that’s neither here nor there.

Brandon specializes in graphic art, but I think that he could excel easily in any visual medium. He knows how to design well and his art shouts it.

This show, “My Love,” features vector art that Chivers has done by hand. I asked him in an incredulous way how he made his art, since to me they looked like something totally done by a computer. He told me though that he did them free hand.

This shocked me. My initial impression was that he produced them through filters, and that a computer did most of the work.

“Filters” refers to automated tools used in Photoshop.

Filters are a good way to produce a certain effect, but compared to the rawness and beauty of Chivers’s images, anything produced with a filter could never come close to this level of artistry.

Chivers instead made his imagery line-by-line, color-by-color. Up close it is a jangled affair, it looks similar to the topography of a weather map or a sonogram, but when you stand back they look like real images. It is suffice to say that Chivers is an expert when it comes to depth, because it is highly difficult to make images that look photographic, especially when it’s in this medium.

The dichotomy between the fine elements of his work and its grand photographic quality is the device that lends meaning to his show, because “My Love” says that you can not judge things from afar. You have to be close to Chivers’s art to get the full picture.
Standing close, there are flourishes and imperfections noticeable on every square image of the blown up images, and it illustrates Chivers’s point perfectly – there are many things you must scrutinize about something until you understand it completely.

Chivers comes from Portland, Ore., and says that he came to Hofstra specifically for its closeness to New York City. Knowing this and knowing that he is the first sophomore gallery artist at Hofstra tells me that he has a massive drive for art, and I admire his passion and think that he is suited perfectly for an art department somewhere in New York City.

“My Love” will be in the FORM Gallery from Oct. 5-11 located in Calkins Hall.