Barbara Ann Brown (1929-2014)

Like so many American women artists of the 20th Century, the painter Barbara Ann Brown created a prolific body of work despite the lack of public support or external recognition.  Her oeuvre and stylistic integrity tells a story of artistic drive, insatiable curiosity and brave perseverance.

Barbara Ann Brown was a formidable and adventurous talent, whose work and exploration fits squarely in the dialogue of modernist painting.  Her work can be looked at in relation to Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner and Louise Fishman, with whom she had a strong connection.

Born in Syracuse,  Barbara Ann Brown studied art at Syracuse University in 1953,  and then went on to pursue Graduate Studies at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1955.  She found continued mentorship and community at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and also traveled abroad to Florence to study painting on a Cresol Fellowship.  She went on to pursue her painting: participating in shows, garnering awards, and landed a teaching position in Philadelphia.

Not unusually, Barbara's artistic and professional path was colored by her struggle with alcoholism and depression.  Her life's path and proclivities did not align with her conservative upbringing and after a promising start to her artistic career, she was admitted to a sanitarium in Kreutzlingen, Switzerland.  Barbara stayed in the sanitarium for nearly a decade, and returned to the states in the eighties. Her time in Kreutzlingen was an artistically productive and happy period.

Brown's paintings are layered, both emotionally and structurally.  The warmth of her colors comes from many layers of different pigments, culminating in deep rich slightly dissatisfied backgrounds. Floating on the canvas, large geometric shapes give the overall feeling of abstract portraits, sometimes nailed firmly within the composition of the painting, oftentimes subtly pulling away from their anchors within the paintings.  Her compositions often evoked tension between grid/square formalism and organic chaos.