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The Locomotives | Oil And Acrylic Painting in Paintings by Owen Brown. Item made of synthetic
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Created and Sold by Owen Brown

Owen Brown

The Locomotives - Paintings

Featured In Minneapolis, MN

These paintings (and several others, in the elevator lobbies) are in the community room of Mill City Quarter, an apartment building that was built where a rail marshalling yard once sat, when Minneapolis was the flour milling capital of the world. The developers wanted a train theme, to connect their residents with the history of the place. I was largely painting abstractions at the time! Lots of fun to lose myself in figurative space again, and it kickstarted my return to modestly representational art.

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Item The Locomotives
Created by Owen Brown
As seen in Minneapolis, Minneapolis, MN
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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.