I expected Eric Calloway’s art to be gritty and absurd, like my introduction to his work: stickers sold in a gumball machine at The Spigot, a dive bar in Hartford.

These stickers were not high art: a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon wearing a denim jacket, Arnold Schwartzenegger above “The Spigot” in Conan the Barbarian‘s brutal font, for example. I was more interested in his DIY distribution. That was until Calloway, also known as Tall Eric, shared his portfolio of paintings and photography – they’re fire.

The first images were these cacophonous, explosive, colorful paintings of organized chaos that could have been done by a very talented Gremlin, and I mean that as a compliment. An even bigger shock: Calloway only started three years ago, on a whim.

“My dad is an artist; he could paint anything,” Calloway told me over coffee at Café Amore downtown. “I was always like, ‘I’ll let him do the whole art thing. Then one day I was like, ‘I like The Joy of Painting, so I got 4×4 canvases, white, black, and gray paint and a palette knife.”

An artist was actualized.

For months Calloway went wild, moving from black and white to color, dousing the canvas in paint and carving it away with a knife, rotating the work to get a drip effect, crisscrossing it with hectic strokes rapid and wild as a futurist. Then he stopped.

“Creativity is a bucket,” he said. “The more you drink, the less there is. Then it’s empty – and you can’t drink from an empty bucket. You just gotta wait till it fills back up.”

Lucky for us, another bucket had been filled: the photography bucket. Now Calloway strides around town with a gifted camera seeking those seconds between thought and action – a quietude unlike his paintings: empty streets, citizens in thought.

He wants junctures: “The moment before realization or the moment before someone laughs, the moment of stepping off the curb; it’s this liminal, in-between state.” 

This moment right now, it may be Eric’s.

See more of Calloway’s work at his Instagram, @talleric666 and at Behance.