About the Artist
Paintings
Henry Brown’s paintings are mechanically drawn geometric abstractions. He forms his imagery from structural schematics constructed with compass and ruler. The schematics are developed from small sketches and then drawn directly on the gessoed canvases. Henry Brown paints the images, but leaves the underdrawings visible to show the substructure, planning and execution of his artwork.
The artist uses mechanical drafting techniques and paints with flat unmodulated color. Yet Henry Brown retains a handmade quality in his artwork, seen in the knifed finish of the gessoed layers, variations in pencil lines and eccentricities of the painted edges.
His imagery appears to be fixed spatially, but visual perception triggers sensations of movement. Depth shifts as surfaces advance and recede. Henry Brown animates the surfaces of his abstract paintings with systems of perspective and changing figure-ground relationships.
Yaddo
Henry Brown has been awarded a residency at Yaddo for 2009. Yaddo is an artists’ community located on a 400-acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. It offers residencies to professional creative artists from all nations and backgrounds working in choreography, film, literature, musical composition, painting, performance art, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and video. Yaddo’s mission is to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment.
ArtsHouston Review
[Henry Brown’s] paintings encourage inspection and deliver on many levels.
—Garland Fielder. “Gallery Sonja Roesch, Machine Learning”, ArtsHouston, April 2008.
Playfully Matter-of-Fact
This show comes at a time when there seems to be a soft revival of that idiom, and Mr. Stanczak, along with Bridget Riley and Richard Anuszkiewicz, can thus be seen as paving the way for younger generations of artists working today, such as Terry Haggerty, Lori Ellison, and Henry Brown.
—Jennifer Riley. “Playfully Matter-of-Fact.” The New York Sun, March 26, 2008. The excerpt is from a review of Julian Stanczak at Danese.
Recent Exhibitions and an Interview
News About Henry Brown: Recent exhibits include MINUS SPACE at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, American Abstract Artists at The Painting Center, Machine Learning traveling exhibition and catalog, also an interview for Houston Public Radio KUHF