Process and Practice

Brown’s career can be divided into four periods, distinguished from each other by medium, content, and method.

1. His early student work, defined by one of his teachers at OCA as “psychosexualism,” is marked by a focus on grotesque figures, male and female, outlined in grease pencil and then coloured or painted in rather roughly. This period covers his time at OCA until 1981, when he began showing at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery. While the first two works that bear the imprimatur of the gallery on their reverse side are examples of this early period, by 1982 his practice and focus had shifted considerably.
2. From 1982 until the Human Heads Series (1989) Brown’s work mixed large panel paintings (overtly influenced by Goya and Bacon) with large scale drawings, mostly of the male figure, generally solitary, and often nude or partially nude.
3. The Human Heads Series marks, I would argue, a turning point in Brown’s career. With the Heads he grew beyond the sometimes explicit references to Goya and Bacon and also offered some of the first examples of his maturing build up-scrape down practice. This period extends from the Human Heads Series through to 2002, when architectural structures and paramilitary vehicles come to predominate over the human figure.
4. The paintings of the final period (2002-2019) are noteworthy for the extraordinary complexity of the final image, a result not only of the severity of the scraping, but from the freer painting practice that had been developing since the Heads. I will comment on each period, focusing on the process and practice. The thematic content and significance of the paintings of the different periods will be the subject of five interpretative essays to be posted in the Criticism section of the archive.

Student Work

Brown studied at the Ontario College of Art and the University of Guelph from 1979 until 1982. His student work was characterized by a fascination with bulbous, grotesque bodies, often masked and typically in highly charged (and sometimes aggressive) sexual acts.

This period is also noteworthy, when compared with his mature works, for the presence of female bodies.

At this time Brown was not yet out as a gay man. I do not want to put too much emphasis on psychoanalytic explanations for the content of his work, but it is difficult to believe that the often aggressive heterosexuality of these early works was completely unconnected to his struggles with his own sexuality.

Be that as it may, from the perspective of his practice, these works bear the marks of being quickly sketched, as if the young mind was anxious to translate its ideas through its hand to the paper or canvas. His fellow student and friend, Marc Deguerre explains in his essay on this formative period that they would work together, often all night, smoking, talking music and art , and painting in the old Experimental Arts Building of OCA. Brown was consumed with finding an artistic language of his own.

The language that he found was austere and simple. Figures are boldly outlined but details are ignored. Facial features are obscured or the faces are explicitly masked. DeGuerre notes that the practice of rubbing or or obscuring the faces was an early hint at what would in the late 1980s become the scraping down practice definitive of Brown’s artistic maturity. The boldness of the outlines, and the stark contrast between the black of the grease pencil (a favourite medium until he more or less abandons drawing in the mid 1990s) evokes a concern with the problem of connection, of relationship, of the infinite emotional and existential distance between people.

These early works show an artist more concerned with evoking mood than providing illustrative detail and accuracy. The palette is simple: almost always just black, white, and red. Although chromatically simple and hasty in composition, these early drawings and paintings begin the conversation between materials, methods, and meanings that would always typify his artistic practice.

While there is little hint of the extraordinarily complex images that he would create in his final period, there is much at the beginning that persists into the next two periods: a focus on the human figure, experiments with obscuring the image, especially the face, an interest in the presentation of the works in thematically connected groups (see the drawing above, which was one of a series of three to be displayed as a triptych) and the atmosphere– emphasized by the predominance of black and red– of dread and violence. But much drops out as well. Even as early as 1982, we will see in the next section, the overt sexuality of these early works, along with the female figures, would mostly disappear. The interpersonal violence towards which these early pieces gesture would remain, but the focus would shift away from sexuality towards war, forcible confinement, and the slow death of industrial work.

From Figurative Drawing to the Human Heads Series: 1982-1989

Brown began showing at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery in 1982. In this early period of his professional career he devoted himself with equal seriousness to both drawing and painting. These practices were tied together by the human figure as the central concern.

In contrast to his heavily worked oils on wood, the drawings exhibited an ability to convey resonant anxieties with very sparse means.

Most of the drawings are simple black grease pencil on a white gesso background. The bodies portrayed are almost always solitary, male or asexual, and typically in some sort of discomfort or confinement.

The scorched landscape of 1960-s 70 Sudbury was often gestured at and evoked. Brown began as and remained an allusive artist: if one knew him one could discover the concrete personal and geographical references mad by which his drawings and paintings. But he was careful to never be so explicit in these references that the viewer felt that they had to seek out information beyond the painting to find out what it was “about.” Paintings and drawings are “about” organizing their content in the materials of painting and drawing. They do not require decoding by connection to an objective referent. They must be understood according to the internal principles of their composition. Brown’s work was never directly about anything external to the painted field. The works had particular starting points (often photographs) , but as finished works they presented the viewer with a total pictorial world which must be read in its own visual language.

Despite the heaviness of the lines that outline the figures and landscapes, the images gain their power from the vastness of the empty space they occupy. The figures bear their crosses alone and lonely.

The influence of the formal methods of art school were also much in evidence in this early period. Brown would develop his paintings from studies and sketches on paper. Over 100 of these studies and sketches survive (see the Works on Paper and Ephemera for a complete inventory of the surviving examples).

By the time of the Heads he had moved beyond this traditional practice towards a more spontaneous and organic process, but in these earlier, more cautious experiments with large scale oil on wood paintings, he worked more deliberately, determining proportions and relationships between the figures on a grid in graphite or grease pencil before committing (valuable and expensive) paint to panel.

For his first ten years Brown pursued drawing and painting with equal seriousness. Gradually he dropped drawing from his practice almost entirely (the last works on paper are from the early 2000s. However, these  portraits of men were never exhibited and appear to be a personal project –see the Works on Paper page). One or two were more elaborated, so he was perhaps thinking of doing something more formal with them, but these plans, if such there were, never came to fruition.

The paintings during the Lamanna years begin with overt references to Goya,

However, they soon moved away from explicit art historical references towards figures that seemed at once translucent and heavy, prefiguring the new techniques that would define the Human Heads Series. The subject matter often drew on adolescent memories of eccentric men from his home town as well as family and friends. There is nothing nostalgic about these works: the mood of dread and violence that typifies the drawings also rules here. The home is a scene of potential or actual violence; figures wrestle, struggle, or threaten one another; lonely houses speak to the isolation and alienation of the dwellers within.

Critics at the time classified Brown with painters like Attila Richard Lukacs who also used the male body as the subject matter for his works. While there are clear thematic connections, Brown’s work was already moving beyond the concern with detailed rendering of his figures. His subjects are certainly depicted with more explicit detail than anyything that would follow, but if one pays attention one can already see that the figures are painted in a way that conceals or obscures as much as depicts a definite person. Faces are overlaid with white smudges or heads are downcast. Although the bodies are in animate motion, the faces are almost like death masks. Brown’s signature painterly language was beginning to take shape.

The Monstrous Human: 1989-2002

Following the not entirely successful 1985 show at Lamanna’s, Brown’s career reached a crisis. He did not show again for the next four years. But when he re-appeared for a show at Lamanna’s in 1989, his practice had transformed. The paintings that comprised the Human Heads series were the first composed with the build up-scrape down technique for which Brown would become best known.

When asked about this technique, Brown explained to Gary Michael Dault that scraping was a form of drawing. Thus, it is perhaps no co-incidence that Brown drew less and less during this period. Instead of planning the final composition through sketches and formal studies, Brown would start them with random and spontaneous applications of paint. The idea for these paintings would come from photographs (most from early editions of the Canadian Who’s Who). However, he did not try to reproduce the appearance of the person on the panel. He would layer paint and then scrape it off, then add more paint and scrape it off, trusting that the final image would resolve itself through this repetitive and quasi-spontaneous practice.

As his work developed further during this period his practice would become more and more spontaneous. By “spontaneous” I mean that he would let the image decide what it needed to become: photographs were the starting point but they simply served as the orienting idea.

The portrayal of solitary Heads and faces evokes the practices of classical portraiture, but Brown subverts the intentions behind the classical portrait. Whereas in the Renaissance and Classical period the wealthy would commission portraits that emphasized their superior social standing and power, Brown’s scraping away renders identification impossible.

One must be careful not to attribute any mechanical political meaning to this literal scarping away of identity: he is not calling for revolution by erasing the identity of his businessmen subjects. As I noted above, his paintings– like all paintings– must be read from the standpoint of their internal composition. As such, these paintings question what it is to paint a human head, and in questioning the means of representing a human head in oil paint on a two dimensional plane, pose deeper questions to the viewer about what a human head, indeed, what a human being, is.

The build-up scrape down practice would be further developed and refined in the subsequent series (Portraits of a Frankenstein and Lazarus, A Delicate Family, Ten Attempts to Imagine the Inside of My Body, Disease, Mouth, and the Autopsy Series).

Themes of monstrosity, embodied vulnerability, and mortality predominate. Many of the paintings experiment with new media incorporated into the oil-based composition: clay, wax, torn paper.

What is most significant from a formal standpoint is the way in which the scraping technique allowed him to reverse the classical practice of painting. In classical practice one begins with a sketch, then makes a study, then composes the painting. Throughout the 1990’s Brown reversed this procedure. He would begin with a highly resolved photograph, randomly apply paint in broad strokes to create uniform colour fields, and then gradually, over many months (sometimes years) resolve the image by scraping those colour fields down, uncovering earlier layers of paint and ultimately yielding images of unrivalled complexity.

This unrivalled complexity of the scraped down image is the defining feature of the final period of Brown’s work.

The Infinite Within

Brown’s development as an artist can be charted by his varying of the relationship between figure and ground. In his early drawings this relationship could not be more stark: black grease pencil figures leap out from a white gesso background. By the time of the Human Heads the background had become a heavily worked production in its own right, as much a creation of the layering-scraping technique as the central figure. In the enigmatic Grimm series that spanned almost twenty years and 96 paintings, figures are sometimes dispensed with altogether.

In others of that series the figure is carefully painted with the cross-hatch technique that developed in the early 2000s while the background is deliberately left sloppy, looking almost (but purposefully) unfinished.

In his very last works, paintings of his deceased partner’s handwriting, the background is pulled on top of the figure: the entire surface of the painting is covered with handwriting as a page would be, and then the whole surface is covered over with a thin wash of paint, obscuring, but not obliterating, the letter-figures. But the most radical experiments with the relationship between figure and ground occur in his large paintings created from 2002 until his death in 2020.

These series returned to his original thematic concerns with isolation and alienation, but the human figure had dropped out. Now the central figures were menacing architectural structures, paramilitary equipment, and machine-like fragments. The human has been subsumed under its technologies of surveillance, control, and domination. Brown was not a political person, but if there was an abiding concern of his art and his life it was freedom from any centralized apparatus of control.

He insisted that art neither follow fashion and nor subserve pet political theses. Art contributes to human freedom by providing material testimony to the power of absolute creativity. He viewed art as the power to invent unseen forms from from mundane materials. Its only duty was to keep pushing out in new directions, to work beyond the bounds of established conventions and values. He believed that the only value that should concern artists was invention (and re-invention).

Brown was famous for working slowly, but not enough attention was paid to the radical turns of practice and content that characterized his career. He exemplified the belief that the artist cannot get comfortable without ceasing to function as an artist: an inventor of forms, a creator of things. His last works are clearly linked to the building up and scarping down developed during the middle period and they were constructed with the same spontaneous process of allowing the image to resolve itself through repeated additions and subtractions of paint (aided in the final decade by photographing different stages of the work and playing with different possibilities on Photoshop. But they are also departures owing to the severity of the scraping down and the fractal-like, infinite complexity of the backgrounds that this radicalized scraping off produced.

If one wants to see infinity one should look carefully at the backgrounds of the last period large works. They are scraped almost to the gesso, but irrupting everywhere are flicks of colour that destroy the classical idea of aesthetic harmony.

One could cut anywhere into the painted surface and carve out a smaller painting (as Brown in fact sometimes did) that would be as compelling as the original. The entire relationship between whole and part is disrupted. These paintings function as wholes to which the parts are subordinate, but any part one chooses to focus upon is like a completed whole in its own right, so visually stimulating and attractive is the result of the scarping down of multiple layers of paint.

The paintings themselves are like the architectural ruins they sometimes explore: as time corrodes and erodes, so the temporal process of stripping away layers of paint leaves behind a composition that Brown could not have intended but nevertheless created.

The last two years before Brown died proved difficult for him. He was struggling to create, but despite those struggles was still finding new directions to explore. The possibilities of the word paintings were only beginning to be delved when he died. He was also planning more large-scale figure paintings and was working on four smaller paintings (perhaps additional Grimm’s) for a planned show in Berlin. These had been barely begun at the time of his death in March, 2020.

As all deaths, Brown’s made his life and career whole. There were still roads to travel and new experiments to make. Nevertheless, the four hundred or so drawings and paintings that comprise his mature career are amongst the most unique and compelling works produced in this country in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. No one has painted like that before. Brown achieved a new plateau of painterly practice which will hopefully serve as an embarkation point for younger artists to learn from and then leave behind.

The Spontaneous Working Our Process: Post-1985

Each painting would begin with the random application of lines and colour fields.

Gradually evolving towards greater and greater complexity.

The resulting painting is the product of a working out process that began from a determinate idea but whose end point could not have been anticipated.