Brian Halsey, unlike many painters of our time, is an artist with a sense of technical excellence and idealism who finds his roots in the art of the fifth century Greece and Renaissance Italy. Nonetheless, he strives to create fresh and unique images that deal with basic issues of 20th Century life.
Halsey's early education was in theology. And as one might expect, his art goes beyond the optical tensions created by Vasarely or the nuances of color balance in Albers' work to a very rich and meaningful spiritual vision. The recurring theme in his work is the God-Man duality and the visual conception of positive and negative space. Whether it is one of the large canvases or his carefully designed serigraphs, the space is fully activated in a unified manner.
Although powerful and striking, Halsey's images are easily assimilated both visually and mentally. Like all things basically sound, they have a quality which intensifies as the viewer lives with them.
-Albert Scaglione