Artist Biography
Brad Brown makes drawings with charcoal, graphite, tea, and olive oil. Drawing figurative and abstract elements democratically, he amasses a quantity of images. From these he culls poetic fragments through a process of tearing and reworking the surface. He smudges, rubs, and doodles in a systematic search for the work’s final form.
Brad Brown made his first prints at Shark’s in July 2002. To achieve the Drifting Low series, Brown made many plates, laying down notations from various sources. The plates were then printed in many combinations and orientations. Brown recalls, “Randomly running the plates through the press gave me the opportunity to ‘watch’ the drawing process, to pay attention and wait for interesting things to occur.” The artist then tore these prints to achieve images that had been separated and reconstructed and poetically discovered.
The artist continued this exploration of mystery and chance in his 2005 monoprints, By and By. Drawing inspiration from his Southern heritage of mountain music and folk tales, Brown created seven lithographic plates that were printed in various colors and combinations on various papers. Tearing the sheets into pieces, he created seventeen unique, new prints that repeat and recontextualize the imagery. “The compositions became increasingly about how to navigate through this banjo-landscape of cottony wisps of torn paper and tarry patches of black ink. Like the music and stories, something is being hushed up and something else is being illuminated; something’s hiding and another thing is winking out from underneath.” The By and By monoprints were exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver in the fall of 2005.
Selected Collections: Arkansas Art Museum, Little Rock, AK; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
View or download his complete biography.
