LifeStyle Magazine: Fine Artists: Emily Brown: (MC, ML, B)

Elegy (triptych), 2003, Ink on paper, 161.5 x 99.5 inches

"One of the Philadelphia area's most distinguished painters, Emily Brown first became known for her traditional landscapes. Many of these focused on her observations of the natural world around her in the Philadelphia region, or the green, hilly country of Waldo County, Maine, where she has spent most of her summers since 1966.

In the last ten years her work has undergone a dramatic evolution, as her attention shifted to earthy 'still lifes' incorporating to such mundane subjects as the compost pile in her back yard -which caught her eye one afternoon while she was painting the plants and flowers nearby. 'It struck me as uniquely sensuous and varied-a profoundly physical, immediate situation,' Brown says of the compost pile. This seemingly ordinary feature of her domestic landscape where, as she says, 'change is constant,' seemed to her to reflect the ephemeral nature of own our lives.

Brown's most recent work has a dramatically different look, in part a result of her move to an indoor studio, where she says, 'season and weather would no longer control my working habits.' The studio environment opened up choices as to subject, scale and working methods. 'I shifted to black-and-white to experiment, where tone and texture are potent elements,' Brown says. She became particularly attracted to ink drawings, whose execution she describes as 'fast and chancy …there is no turning back.' Her large-scale, ethereal drawings of trees and water focus less on the specific, physical details of the land, but rather become a meditative study of its natural forms and rhythms.

'Rather than simply recording the world around her, Brown's landscapes reflect her personal journey as a woman and an artist,' Senior Curator Brian H. Peterson says. 'This evolution grew out of her sense of creative exploration and restlessness, but even more from her own experience of dealing with such universal issues as aging, grief, and freedom.'"