Frederick J. Brown has been a passionately expressive painter for over thirty years. Throughout his career this extremely prolific artist was inspired and compelled to paint on a wide range of subjects and themes. The exhibition, Frederick J. Brown: Portraits of Music I Love are compositions selected from his Jazz and Blues series. Early in Brown's career while living in New York City, a health crisis forced him to ultimately rethink his artistic priorities and commit a significant portion of his energies to documenting jazz and blues musicians. The artistic community of Brown's early years included working and living with musicians like Ornette Coleman and Anthony Braxton. They impressed upon him the importance of strong daily work ethic. It was not until years later that he discovered that it was the musicians and artists from that community of intellectual geniuses who paid his hospital bills, thus saving his life--a debt he had to repay.
Brown was born in Greensboro, Georgia in 1945 and was raised by working class parents in Chicago's South Side communities. It was there that he became familiar with the Chicago jazz and blues culture that was in part an outgrowth of the strong spiritual traditions of the Black Church and the African's musical response to life in America. In college he trained as an architectural major, but later switched to fine arts. By the time he arrived in New York in 1970, he had developed a very sophisticated knowledge of art history with a specific passion for German Expressionism and American Abstract Expressionism. In 1975, Brown met the renowned modernist painter Willem de Kooning who urged him to make painting a "sacred calling." Brown is clear about his origins and influences and describes how, "I was always in love with Abstract Expressionism...Abstract Expressionism was a very beautiful, lyrical language.... Also, I had always been fascinated with that type of surface because my mother was a baker and I used to like to watch her frost cakes and things."
Portraits of Music I Love is comprised of nineteen over-life size portraits, one abstract composition, and two small paintings of a trumpet and a banjo. The defining elements of Brown's paintings can all be found in the fundamental dynamics of jazz and blues idioms-rhythm, improvisation, call and response. The debt Brown must repay to the musicians who saved his life is his "response" to their "call" to live and make art. The rhythm is the repetition of daily practice and work-improvisation comes with every challenge the painter encounters each time he faces an empty canvas.
The centerpiece of exhibition is an abstraction study, Portraits of Music I Love, which is the sum of all the visual complexities Brown is constantly seeking to define and express. It is virtual cacophony of color, rhythm and improvisation. It speaks to the embodiment of all the history, culture, experience, intellect and sensual essence jazz and blues have come to represent in the modernist and post-modern world. In Brown's philosophy "Music controls the rhythm of my work.... Sound has lots of colors in it."
In the figurative portraits, the images speak to the synergy that project from the vibrant surfaces of these monumental architectonic compositions. These musicians are elevated to the status of an icon and honor the contributions of their artistry and musical genius. This was critical to Brow's objective to not just capture the image of a "star" personality stating that, "I am not painting from life...I'm trying to get the feeling rather than just a likeness." Poet extraordinaire Amiri Baraka--also a major jazz and blues critic believes that art is not viable without the senses being moved out of a comfortable place that we already know. It is a crucial factor in the journey of human beings as they struggle with understanding the meaning and intent of life. The portraits of Frederick J. Brown are exciting as he reveals to us how to see the sounds he is moved to create.
Frederick J. Brown has been a passionately expressive painter for over thirty years. Throughout his career this extremely prolific artist was inspired and compelled to paint on a wide range of subjects and themes. The exhibition, Frederick J. Brown: Portraits of Music I Love are compositions selected from his Jazz and Blues series. Early in Brown's career while living in New York City, a health crisis forced him to ultimately rethink his artistic priorities and commit a significant portion of his energies to documenting jazz and blues musicians. The artistic community of Brown's early years included working and living with musicians like Ornette Coleman and Anthony Braxton. They impressed upon him the importance of strong daily work ethic. It was not until years later that he discovered that it was the musicians and artists from that community of intellectual geniuses who paid his hospital bills, thus saving his life--a debt he had to repay.
part an outgrowth of the strong spiritual traditions of the Black Church and the African's musical response to life in America. In college he trained as an architectural major, but later switched to fine arts. By the time he arrived in New York in 1970, he had developed a very sophisticated knowledge of art history with a specific passion for German Expressionism and American Abstract Expressionism. In 1975, Brown met the renowned modernist painter Willem de Kooning who urged him to make painting a "sacred calling." Brown is clear about his origins and influences and describes how, "I was always in love with Abstract Expressionism...Abstract Expressionism was a very beautiful, lyrical language.... Also, I had always been fascinated with that type of surface because my mother was a baker and I used to like to watch her frost cakes and things."
d in the fundamental dynamics of jazz and blues idioms-rhythm, improvisation, call and response. The debt Brown must repay to the musicians who saved his life is his "response" to their "call" to live and make art. The rhythm is the repetition of daily practice and work-improvisation comes with every challenge the painter encounters each time he faces an empty canvas.
The centerpiece of exhibition is an abstraction study, Portraits of Music I Love, which is the sum of all the visual complexities Brown is constantly seeking to define and express. It is virtual cacophony of color, rhythm and improvisation. It speaks to the embodiment of all the history, culture, experience, intellect and sensual essence jazz and blues have come to represent in the modernist and post-modern world. In Brown's philosophy "Music controls the rhythm of my work.... Sound has lots of colors in it."
st a likeness." Poet extraordinaire Amiri Baraka--also a major jazz and blues critic believes that art is not viable without the senses being moved out of a comfortable place that we already know. It is a crucial factor in the journey of human beings as they struggle with understanding the meaning and intent of life. The portraits of Frederick J. Brown are exciting as he reveals to us how to see the sounds he is moved to create.