ABOUT JOAN BROWN
Joan Brown was an American figurative painter who lived and worked in Northern California. She was a member of the "second generation" of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.
BORN: February 13, 1938, San Francisco, CA
DIED: October 26, 1990, Puttaparthi, India
SPOUSE: MANUEL NERI (m. 1962)
EDUCATION: San Francisco Art Institute (1960)
After attending the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), Joan Brown found early success working in the style of her mentor, the Bay Area Figurative painter Elmer Bischoff. In 1964, however, she rebelled against stylistic constraints and retreated to her studio to experiment. She moved away from thick paint application and began to explore autobiographical and spiritual themes. Her 1975 appointment to the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, allowed her greater independence from the art market. A few years later her work changed direction again, increasing in scale, shifting toward sculpture, incorporating mosaic tiles, and taking up more non-Western subjects. In 1990, the ceiling of a temple in India where she was installing a mosaic sculpture collapsed, killing Brown and two assistants.
QUOTE BY JOAN BROWN
“How do I know when I’ve finished a painting? It’s when that element of surprise is there. I can feel the flow start to happen just in terms of working, which is actually an altered state of consciousness,”
WHAT I WISH FOR YOU TODAY
I wish you an element of surprise.