Emily Brown: Brush Drawings and Collages

by Susan Hagen

art review

Cold weather is finally upon us -- and now an exhibition of 14 works on paper by Emily Brown at Gallery Joe sings the praises of the smell of winter, the sound of crunching boots on snow and the sparkle of snow-blind light upon the landscape. Brown lives and works part of the year in Philadelphia and part in Maine, and in addition spent last winter at MacDowell Artist's Colony in rural New Hampshire, where she produced several of the works in the show.

The exhibition highlights these pieces along with Brown's other recent sumi-ink-on-paper drawings, prints and collages of landscapes and reveals a mature artist at work. She studied at Penn, and was influenced by the plein air landscape painting of Neil Welliver and Rackstraw Downs, but since then has devised her own creative response to the landscape. After painting with oils for many years, she has found that ink-wash drawing allows her to work on a larger scale and with more freedom. Working from photographs and memory she improvises with traditional Asian brush drawing techniques -- using rich textures and values of pearly gray, smoke-colored and dark-gray washes of ink -- to produce spontaneous and refined landscape studies.

Displayed in Gallery Joe's Front Gallery, Winter II, (52 by 78 inches), offers an engaging close-up of six or seven scrawny tree trunks and over- and under-lapping branches that form a mesh of delicate horizontal and diagonal lines. Shades of medium gray are balanced over the surface of the paper, suggesting a pale northern light. When examined from a closer perspective, the entire image breaks down into a mass of abstract calligraphy -- consisting of multiple layers of wet and dry brushstrokes. Brown has the essential drive of a mark-maker like Agnes Martin or Jackson Pollock; she energizes each mark with individuality and pleasure. Her lines are thick, thin, short and long, crabbed and smooth, and knitted together with a few solid blocks of value. In another large piece, A Fond Farewell (52 by 96 inches), she imbues the dense marks and values that make up the leaves with an earthy richness. Here she has drawn a stand of massive trees, perhaps sycamores or tulip poplars, seen from the ground, with great affection. Brown's virtuosity with the medium works perfectly to show the fleeting and temporary nature of these substantial trees. Typical of a group of smaller pieces, Choir (26 by 41 inches) employs an even greater excess of marks by combining fragments of several scenes (or perhaps the same scene) of a forest at different times of the year, like overlapping memories of a place or phases of a journey.

Elegy (98 by 164 inches), a large triptych, is hung alone in the Vault Gallery with startling dramatic effectiveness. Brown selected a disheveled piece of winter woodland and studied it closely while making this drawing. Tangled underbrush interwoven with curling branches and tree trunks emerges out of a base of pure white new snow. Mysterious small copper-colored marks in the center of the triptych suggest a divinity or wild spirit. The optical effect is of a glistening and ephemeral world of chaos and order, which Brown achieves with thousands of dots and short, fat brush marks. The sensory aspects of this vast landscape are primary, yet Elegy, like many of the drawings in the show, evokes a beautifully complicated emotional landscape. Painted in the comfort of the studio (the winter outdoor environment is potentially dangerous for ink-on-paper works) Brown has re-enacted her experience of the landscape with each mark, and it seems that in the process she's created a shrine to the miraculous balance of chaos and order in nature.

This show has the calming effect of a walk in quiet winter woods. I went into the gallery half-crazed with holiday stress and worries, and emerged an hour later calm, relaxed and cool.