On March 21st, 2020, John Brown, one of Canada’s most original and talented painters died in Toronto of complications following a heart attack. This webpage aims to become the most comprehensive and authoritative source of information on Brown’s life and work. Here you will find: a complete catalogue of his work, including juvenilia and ephemera, a list all his exhibited works, all published catalogues, reviews, discussions, and critical evaluations of his work, an evolving set of critical essays, and photographs and documents that provide indispensable context for his work.. The themes touched on in this introductory essay will be developed at greater length in the critical essays. My goal here is to provide an overview of Brown’s career, chart the main steps in his development, note the most important influences on his understanding of art and painting, and comment briefly on the emergence of his unique painterly practice.
Brown was born in Sarnia, Ontario, on July 4th, 1953. His father was a bank manager. His mother, a witty and imaginative intelligence, did not work. When his father was transferred by the bank in 196… the family moved to Garson, Ontario, a small mining town that is today part of the City of Greater Sudbury. The apartment at the back of the bank where the lived backed onto the lands surrounding the Garson mine. The harsh, scared, and scorched rocky landscape of the region in the 1960’s and 70’s formed an important source of imagery and atmosphere for Brown’s early work. Some of his earliest professional drawings pictured forlorn or struggling figures in a landscape of black rocks or factories. The landscape clearly evokes the then charred hills of Sudbury and the factories recall the smelters that ringed the city.
The early influence of Sudbury was made obvious in one of his first shows at the Carmen Lamanna gallery. “Something That Happened in Sudbury” was an installation of six drawings (Searching for a Place to Stand) and a sculptural work of three clay figures lying (dead?) next to each other. The structure in which they are encased was inspired by “cage” that takes miners underground. The overt Northern and working class imagery would fade in his mature paintings, but the aura of work, suffering, and struggle would never disappear.
A small mining town in Northern Ontario was not an easy place to be for an adolescent struggling with his sexual identity, with an artistic sensibility, and a taste for avante garde rock music (The Velvet Underground, The Stooges). He hid his homosexuality and find a few like minded friends with whom he formed a band. His earliest artistic expressions were doodled of hot rods and muscle cars. In the mid-1970’s he began to draw and paint portraits of his family. The earliest portrait dates from 1975, and pictures Brown’s brother Joe.
There is little evidence in these rather straightforward and somewhat awkwardly painted canvases of the awesome expressive power of Brown’s mature works on wood. There was enough trace of talent to gain Brown admission to the Ontario College of Art in 1977 (Graduating in 1981). (Prior to attending OCA Brown had studied photography at Humber College in 1975.) Although he never incorporated photography into his artistic practice, he admired many twentieth century photographers (Man Ray, Robert Franck) and generally used photographic images as the starting point for his paintings.
Photography was thus a starting point for Brown in two senses. It marked the beginning of his formal training and it continued to exercise an influence as the starting point of most of his paintings. But it was the content and not the form of photographs that exercised his imagination: he worked from images that he found compelling and captivating: diseased bodies, remarkable buildings, menacing weapons. He never aimed to reproduce the image but to explore the boundaries of aesthetic transformation of the image. Like the modernist painters he admired, his goal was to experiment with what painting could do to the representations of bodies and things for the sake of expanding our thoughts and feelings about what bodies and things really are. His aim was never to instruct but always to provoke and propose.
The provocative essence of his treatment of subject-matter was little in evidence in his earliest paintings. His first, pre-art school efforts were typical portraits of family members and himself, done on canvas date from 1975-76. (See juvenilia page). Looking at his early student work in comparison to this juvenilia, one concludes that there was a latent talent that would never have developed without a move to a larger city and the exposure to art history, professional materials, expert instruction, and cultural companionship it afforded.
He threw himself into the city and the possibilities for creative exploration it offered. He formed a band with along with fellow student Marc DeGuerre (Rongwrong) and helped produce literary-artistic zines at OCA with the now well-known video artist Rebecca Garrett.
While Sudbury’s scared landscape was an early inspiration, Brown very much became a man of the city and a Toronto painter. After two years studying at OCA, his unremarkable early portraits had transmogrified into Baconian monsters, pale mummies floating in dark landscapes, tortured bodies that evoke the human content of the passion of Christ. He came to public attention with a new group of Toronto painters in early 1980s. His first professional show was a group exhibit in 1981 at the prestigious Carmen Lamanna Gallery with Marc DeGuerre, Brian Boignon, and Joanne Tod.
Critics at the time would point to Bacon and Goya as obvious early influences, but Brown’s deepest influences were more classical painters. As long time friend and fellow artist Howard Lonn explains, “Jack was so drawn to the images and iconography of Italian Trecento and Quattrocento painters (and later masters) for the possibilities that pictorial language offered for addressing the human body in a pictorial space. It offered him a door into image making that was emphatically distinct from the prevailing colourfield painting that was so ubiquitous during the time of our student days.” Other key influences were early modernists like Cezanne and Soutine, Guston’s playful explorations of the mundane life of human bodies, and Giacometti’s paintings of faces staring wide-eyed at the dark into which all lives ultimately resolve themselves. He was also influenced by Muybridge’s photographic studies of bodies in motion, and admired and learned from contemporary artists like Baselitz, Middendorf, Imminendorf, Penck, and Basquiat.
Brown’s mature paintings exist between the poles of abstraction and representational rendering of subject matter. As Lonn noted, he reacted against the abstract expressionism still popular at OCA in the late 1970’s because he felt its formalism emotionally arid and aesthetically uninteresting. (The one exception is Guston, but Guston notably abandoned his earlier abstract work in favour of a return to painting bodies and things). Brown was not a stylist but first and foremost a crafter of works. That which interested him most was the problem of how to make paintings that drew us more deeply into a recognizable but not obvious world. While his earliest exhibited works were replete with Christian iconography and his 1985 show at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery contained a number of works which were, in retrospect, too transparent attempts to be relevant, Brown learned his lesson. As John Bentley Mays said of that show, there were too many “self-conscious, feeble images pastiched from Time Magazine covers and other media sources– the artists clumsy effort to shake old-fashioned painterly expressiveness from his art.”(Globe and Mail, Oct.1, 1988, p.C17)
In that same exhibit there was, nonetheless, a foreshadowing of where his art would ultimately go– not forwards to post-modern mulitmedia, but back to painting. The “Fully Scaled Portrait” which was also in that 1985 scuffed and marred the faces of the figures depicted. Following that show Brown retreated to his studio of three years, re-emerging with the pivotal 1988 show at Lamanna’s to display his Human Heads series. These would be an open embrace of what Mays called–rightly– Brown’s conservative aesthetic vocabulary, but also the first to fully showcase the scarping/scuffing/obscuring technique which would define his work from that point.
From that 1988 sow forward, his work had no didactic pretensions: his paintings were not instructions for life but invitations to see differently and feel more about the mundane world. He did not feel that it was the function of the artist to tell us what we ought to find there once we enter into it. Brown was more craftsperson than intellectual. He had little time for the academicization of art, often comparing it to the suffocating salon system against which his modernist heroes rebelled. He taught for a couple of years at the University of Guelph (where he had ironically received a BFA in 1982) but hated the institutional confines. He loved working with students, but could not reconcile his understanding of art as creative freedom with the rules of the classroom. Art was about making evocative objects that move people, not about doing research for which one could then receive a grade.
His abiding affirmation of art as free creative practice led him to constantly play with technique and methods. His experiments with method led him away from drawing on paper to painting on wood. This shift was inspired by his love of pre-Renaissance Italian art, noted above, and allowed for a greater range of painting techniques—including the scarping away of paint for which he became most well-known. He himself explained making by scraping—production by subtraction- as a form of drawing; i.e., a way of resolving an image, but not into a photographic representation, but rather of a form shaped by the weathered and weighty materiality of real life. More than anything, that weather materiality gives his best works their arresting evocative power.
Nevertheless, the mature works are not simply scarped down surfaces: they are the results of complex dialect of adding and scraping, equal parts building up and taking off. His brush work and layering of paint was under-appreciated by critics who focussed one-sidedly on the scarping technique.
The real genius of his work as paintings is the fractal relationship between the whole and parts. When one studies the post-late 1980’s work (beginning with the Human Heads series) one can find an infinite number of aesthetically compelling forms nested within the painting as a whole. One could cut the painting into any number of smaller paintings and the result would be a coherent whole in its own right. (In fact, Brown did this once to a minor work and gave the results to women in his family (see the Juvenilia and Ephemera page).
The development of his techniques was not sufficiently noted or explored by reviewers and critics. Subsequent essays will explore the details of this development, but Brown the layering and scraping technique never became a static cliché. He continued to expand his subject matter: he never abandoned his explorations of the human body, its needs, desires, afflictions, hopes and terrors, but he also began to incorporate the machinic and architectural into his subject matter.
This expansion of subject matter went hand in hand with a new severity of scraping. Some of his most important latter works have backgrounds scarped almost down to the gesso while a menacing mechanical structure seems to float in all most 3-dimensional relief in the centre and foreground. Commenting on this turn in Brown’s work, David Liss, curator of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian art draws attention to the way these severely scaroed surfaces “liberate the viewer from didactic meaning, not only in regard to the paintings themselves, but from entrenched and authoritative defintions of painting.” (John Brown: The Visceral Thing, p.50). This reading is one of the few that fully appreciates what to my mind is the singular accomplishment of Browns’ work as paintings: they force us to acknowledge aesthetic experience as confrontation with worked material.
Up close, even those paintings most scraped down to the gesso become polychromatic cacophonies of accidental vectors formed by the scarping down; from afar the paintings evoke a sense of menace and looming imprisonment in the structures we ourselves have built.
The paintings, as Brown says and Liss understood, “do not teach” (John Bentley Mays, “Answers: A Fiction” in John Brown: The Visceral Thing, p.15). Still, they do have something to say to our world. However, they should be approached as challenges and questions, not pat answers: How can the painterly image alter the appearance of the bodies and things of the world in ways which encourage the viewer to interrogate their assumptions about the normal and natural and perhaps see more deeply into the fundamental predicaments of embodied life? The painting is a communicative and evocative object for Brown, but the language it speaks should never be obvious.
The highest goal of art, for Brown, was freedom from expectations. There was no point to being an artist if all one did with one’s power to make was to repeat conventional political platitudes or provide decorations for rooms. This general freedom from expectations is expressed in the freedom of the art object from the everyday objects from which the artistic construction began. Again, the point of art is not to instruct, not to tell us: “ this is a face,” “this is an armoured car,” but rather to challenge us to think about what –for example– a face can become, and—more generally- what emotional valences the painterly transformation of the everyday can provoke. Art that lives on does so because it transcends the context of its production, and it can only transcend the context of its production if it continues to instigate live emotional responses in the viewer. If art is mere commentary on the contemporary scene, it will die as soon as the context or fashions change.
While he had consistent champions amongst Toronto art critics (John Bentley Mays of the Globe and Mail and National Post and Gary Michael Dault of the Globe and Mail), his work was not given the attention it was due in the academic art critical or museum worlds. With the important exception of his 2008 career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in 2008, public museums showed no interest, even as his paintings grew in power and originality to take on a sui generis appearance with no real analogues in contemporary painting. Brown was always more respected by other artists than the academic art critical world. While he always lamented the paucity of critical attention relative to the respect his work had within the artistic community, he did little to elicit more attention. He did not seek the limelight and did not try to curry favour with the art critical establishment. His work was always highly sought after by both private and institutional collectors (which perhaps generated suspicion amongst some in the art critical establishment who delude themselves into thinking that they live free of the influence of wealth because they work in universities) but not as eagerly sought out by major museums. Both the National Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario own works by Brown, as do smaller regional galleries, but their indifference to his later and best work remained a sore spot until the moment of his death.
Nevertheless, the value of art is in the work, not its critical reception, which will always wax and wane. I remain convinced that Brown’s paintings will continue to resonate with new generations of artists and art lovers, and perhaps in time critical attention will circle back to give the body of work the depth and breadth of critical attention it deserves. This website will serve as a dynamic record of his achievements and be freely available as a resource for anyone who remains or becomes interested in Brown’s beautiful and resonant body of work.
Jeff Noonan
Windsor, ON
August, 2020