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Two early drawings | Drawings by Owen Brown. Item made of paper
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Created and Sold by Owen Brown

Owen Brown

Two early drawings

The client came to my studio, and was idly going through my flat file, when she came on these two drawings, from a series I completed directly after leaving the California College of Arts. Art school was good for something!

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Item Two early drawings
Created by Owen Brown
As seen in Private Residence, San Francisco, CA
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Owen Brown
Meet the Creator
Wescover creator since 2020
Only art can make articulate yearning.

I received my artistic training at Yale College and at California College of Art. My works have been collected in the US and abroad, I have pieces at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and at the Weisman Museum of Minneapolis. I have also done installations (one, covering a quarter section, is owned by the Land Institute in Salina, KS) and collaborate with artists of other practices, such as the choreographer Anat Shinar.

I was taught in the figurative tradition, but I also work rather abstractly, and I don’t always have a theme that I want to put forth. I don’t know how I will finish when I start, except that there is something within that I want to express, something that I want to build, something that I want to say. Painting is not the same as speech, even when it is depicting a scene. We leap to story, but it is the story behind the story, behind speech, that is my subject matter.

My work is about longing, time, emotion, loss and recovery. I keep these in mind:

From the contemporary American poet Mary Oliver:

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

And from the German romantic poet Holderlin:

“Where danger lies, there deliverance also grows.”

These help me understand the process a bit better, where the painting begins to reveal itself. I was trained to paint every day, and I do so, although much of creation lies in wait for the artist. Conversely, the artist himself must wait for something to happen. Stillness is as important as action.

On my good days I am a painter. On my best moments, I am someone who is trying to uncover and describe something new, so that we can have it within our range of humanity. That should be enough.