Meet Lee Brown

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lee Brown.

Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I was a child of the Great Depression, I did not grow up in a home with art, even bad art. We did not always have food, let alone art. Out of necessity, in 1948, I became a paperboy. Each day, I read the Berkshire Evening Eagle — front page news first and then the comics. With my meager earnings, I bought comics — Blackhawk, Crime Does Not Pay, lots of westerns and Classic Comics. In the primordial space of the subconscious, the news and comics became intertwined and the result shows up in my work even today.

I went to budget-minded public schools with no frills like art and PE. And no one ever brought up the subject of art. We were intermittently a nation at war and a nation struggling to gather all the material riches necessary to get to the next great place — a world with a phone (1951), a 19” black and white TV that got two channels and a ‘53 Ford with a heater and a radio.

In high school, one of my coworkers told me about a free film event and suggested it might be interesting. I went to see Mann Ray. It was 1953 and I didn’t know such work existed. But it was a hint that there was another world out there: it got me ready for Jack Kerouac, Hubert Selby, Jr., Henry Miller, Albert Camus and all the other artistic forces that inhabited an existential world on whose shores I was about to land and occupy for twenty years.

I wrote poetry as a member of the Silent Generation, but as I began to paint, the lone human form in Hopper’s Nighthawks gave way to a more social and political vision. I have won prizes with paintings such as Paul Ryan Has a Vision of America and Citizen’s United. My work has been shown in the Eric Fischl Gallery, Mesa Art Center, and the Phoenix Art Museum. I am a member of the Arizona Artists Guild and the Artery Collective and regularly show there.

Please tell us about your art.
In my forties, I managed to take a single semester painting course.

My daughter had the art bug and, against all my protestations, had become an art history major. She dragged me out to visit galleries and see all kinds of art — Clark, MFA, MOMA, Frick, National Gallery, Prado, Louvre, Tate. It was a high price art education course and I learned. I still own the giclee of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights that I bought from a street vendor outside the Prado. I look at it in amazement every single day. In my forties, I managed to take a single semester painting course. And so it started.

Concurrently, my teen-aged sons introduced me to adult cartoons. Matt Groening’s The Simpsons especially got my attention. Bart and Homer took on the whole of society — capitalism, politics, materialism, the dark underside of rock n’ roll, the hypocritical piousness of the baby boomer generation, As I was laughing, I came to realize that this too was art — and not that far from the work of Bosch, Goya, and the other artists whom I had come to love. It could show the truth which everyone knows is beauty.

A pattern emerged. My heroes were the artists that revealed man using all the tools at their disposal. Francisco Goya could keep the crowned heads happy enough to pay the rent and keep his own head while at the same time producing art that was critical of the people for whom he was working. Diego Rivera could go to Rockefeller Center and paint a mural praising communism. He could use color, form, and volume to make a beautiful painting. Bosch could point out the hypocrisy and evil of man with elegance and imagination.

With my work — Dreamers, Golden Calf, Aging in America, Ferguson, and the rest–I am traveling the path that Bosch, Goya, Rivera, the Social Realists of the thirties, the Chicago Imagists (especially Roger Brown) of the seventies and eighties Groening and other contemporary artists still travel. I embrace the dynamic relationship among thought, history, culture, morality, and art. I believe that this dynamic is as important as that of color, volume, and line.

Someone told me that the purposes of art are to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. I know which side I fall toward.

Choosing a creative or artistic path comes with many financial challenges. Any advice for those struggling to focus on their artwork due to financial concerns?
I know many artists and only a small percentage are able to live exclusively on sales. And I applaud them.
However, I feel that it is a great advantage to be able to paint without needing to make sales. When you need to make sales to put food on the table, you have to think about “What does the customer want?” And you may be able to paint it… for example “kitties”. I know I could make money by painting people’s kitties. They would pay me and praise me. I have kitties, love kitties and occasionally my kitties will show up in a picture. But I do not want to paint kitties. I want to paint a picture like “Ferguson” that shows the social evils and the drama of protest supported by a society of non-involvement.

My advice for the young artist would be to do what artists have done: work the minimum you need to eat and maintain your studio in a job that doesn’t suck your creative energy dry or leave you physically exhausted. Build an inventory of completed work, show opportunistically, and look for an agent or gallery to represent you.

How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
I am a member of the Arizona Artists Guild and the Artery Collective and regularly show there. The Artery Gallery is on Indian School Road in Phoenix.

At this point, the primary support that I seek is fresh opportunities to show my work. For example, I recently showed at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Paradise Valley.

Contact Info:

• Address: 4042 West Beverly Lane
  Phoenix, AZ 85053
• Website: LEEHBROWN.COM
• Phone: 623-703-2101
• Email: lhbrown@cox.net
• Facebook: Facebook Lee Brown

Image Credit:
Lee Brown

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