Untitled

Untitled

Former UCLA Professor Ray Brown’s newest exhibit at the FIG
gallery explores the beauty and horrors of the human experience.
The names of his favorite pieces? Let’s just say he’ll have to
describe them to you …

By Rodney Tanaka

Daily Bruin Staff

What’s in a name?

Artist and former UCLA Professor Ray Brown invests little
meaning into names, especially those attached to his paintings. At
the moment his works are untitled.

"Once you put a simple-minded title on, it tends to define the
work that you might want to be more expansive," Brown says. "The
painting speaks for itself."

Brown’s paintings are available for discussion at the First
Independent Gallery in Santa Monica through March 16. A featured
work in the exhibit depicts a mother and her baby with floral
patterns and abstract imagery.

"I think of this as the ‘Birth of Walt Disney’ because it has
some cartoon elements as well as being a critique of our culture in
the sense of what we show to children, the odd mix of what’s overly
sweet at the same time that the company is extremely repressive for
anything that doesn’t suit that company’s image," Brown says. "My
own life is influenced by Walt Disney images and they pop up in
this work.

"I was remembering a Mickey Mouse balloon, even to the humanized
projections we make onto nature," Brown adds. "I wouldn’t want
someone to fix on that title as literally being the birth of Walt
Disney."

The work began as a single painting on paper. Brown added more
pieces until the work was completed, a collection of 12 panels.

"The subject matter became a conscious decision but parts of the
picture dealt with the abstract pattern integrated into the general
picture of nature," Brown says. "Parts of this picture was painted
directly from nature, parts of it were drawn from specific persons,
parts were completely invented."

The exhibit as a whole focuses on the beauty and horrors of
life, a trip inside Brown’s mind. Brownland rather than
Disneyland.

"I really want to put together the sense of beauty in life that
Raphael might paint together with something that an artist like
Goya would paint in his reaction to the horrors of life," Brown
says. "I do want that whole range of human experience involved in
my work, this mixture of beauty and ugliness present in every
work."

Brown finds beauty, and frustration, in smiling faces. The
painting not titled "The Birth of Walt Disney" features a smiling
mother.

"I’ve wanted to do smiling faces, partly because it’s a
difficult thing to make work in a painting," Brown says. "To get it
right, the degree of naturalism and artificiality all together in
this face I had to paint it 10 or 12 times. Sometimes you despair
of ever getting there."

On the opposite wall the painting of a fly in dark colors
attests to the horrors of life.

"I think of our relationship with the world as being a
reflection of our health, sick in some instances," Brown says. "I
go to the insect world, (it) is not only beautiful but
frightening."

Brown also turned to the natural world to examine human
perceptions. A study of trees progresses into a painting of a
penis.

"I’m thinking both about the fact that the tree has the form it
has for reasons that are totally different from our reasons but at
the same time it’s operating against gravity and everything else in
similar ways," Brown says. "Then projecting a more active, moving
human characteristics in a tree, emotions, burning, and finally to
make it clear, the phallic projections we put onto anything that
has some of the shape of a phallus."

The first section of the exhibit focuses on geometry. A painting
of an arm contains the faint outline of rectangular patterns. A
woman’s face blends into a pattern of circles.

"I started with a geometric pattern onto which I projected
whatever appeared, so I was working with toy-like forms, simplified
images," Brown says. "I was looking at nature and letting geometry
out of nature and as I go, they converged. Conceptually I’m
thinking about the way we feel about balance and form and how we
relate, how we like to see."

Brown finds balance by spending time in Los Angeles and Paris.
He bought a house in Paris after retiring from UCLA, and many of
the paintings in his exhibit were created overseas. His choice of
paper as a medium results from training as well as
circumstance.

"It came naturally because I was a printmaker," Brown says. "In
order to transport things back and forth from France to here I
wanted them small."

Living in Paris opens opportunities unavailable stateside,
especially because Brown enjoys working in natural
surroundings.

"In France you can be not too far from Paris and experience just
about everything that the art world has to offer in the western
world," Brown says. "At the same time I can go out to a beautiful
countryside relatively inexpensively."

UCLA may not boast the same reputation for fine wine and food as
Paris, but it holds a special place for Brown.

"The university is a great place for someone who wants to
maintain an active professional life," Brown says. "You’re expected
to do your work at the same time as teaching and you’re given a lot
of time to do it."

"It’s such a habit with professors to keep on working rather
than taking a vacation," Brown adds. "I’m very happy now working at
nothing but making art. Now I have the time to show the work as
well."

ART: "Ray Brown: Paintings" at the First Independent Gallery in
Santa Monica. Through March 16. For more info, call (310)
829-0345.

"Ray Brown: Paintings," currently showing at the FIG Gallery in
Santa Monica through March 16. The exhibit features the UCLA
professor emeritus’ untitled works. Brown leaves his paintings
without titles because he feels names permit only one definition of
his artwork.

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