It is with great sadness that we mourn the death of John Brown.
1953-2020
A truly great painter
“Painting is a way to glimpse the changes in things, as they grow up, decay, disappear. It is a way to be alive, to practice active resistance to the notion that there is order and intelligence in the universe. A way to recognize – a way to keep reminding myself, to insist – that there are things other than culture operating in the formation of the self. My colours are often faded, which enables the paintings to be seen in continuity with nature, which also fades and dies and ceases to be. Biology, sexuality and painting bear witness to the decline at the heart of existence.
When I was a younger man, I was obsessed with the body and death. Hence, my interest in Francis Bacon and other painters of his sort. Now, I think I have said everything about the body thatI need to say, and the focus of my work is much more formal. Or perhaps I am just more calm, living, as I do, in the body of a man over fifty, free, at least a little, of some passions of my younger years. I don’t know. But there is one thing I do know: that my hidden body, older now, is still in the work, disclosing and closing, opening and shutting in the marks I make.”
From an essay and interview “Answers” by John Mays, 2011
Click here to view a PDF of Wilde Gallery’s John Brown Catalogue with the complete essay.
JOHN BROWN
Brown's paintings have been described as "survivors of their own making." His process is immensely labour-intensive: a single work can take years to complete. The solitary act of applying paint, building imagery and then aggressively reducing the piece back down to its core, only to begin again, encapsulates this repetitive pattern of sublime creation and violent destruction.
Said to awaken "latent memories," Brown's paintings approach the human psyche from a shared plateau of collective experience. His paintings are not only seen, they are felt: emotionally and physically. The artist states that each painting, "inherently promises that there may actually be a future. Any act of creation is optimistic. Any act of creation is about hope."
