Featured Artist Ann-Marie Brown

Artist Ann-Marie Brown’s lush oil and encaustic paintings are an invitation to linger. Learn more about this artist and view her portfolio by visiting her website.

 

 

I paint layer upon layer of oil and wax on the canvas.

 

 

There is an unpredictability to this process which I appreciate, because it disrupts my intention for a piece and opens a dialogue with the emerging image.

 

 

I think that the mind that is painting is more interesting than the mind that is thinking about painting.

 

 

Having a process that doesn’t allow me to visualize a painting, and then methodically arrive at that painting provides an opportunity for the active painting mind to push the work to a place that wasn’t consciously available.

 

 

The marks that build up on the canvas while the painting is being fought for have a value—like scars and wrinkles on a person they are a story of becoming, written on the body.

 

 

In my figure works the subject of the painting isn’t the likeness, but the encounter itself, the dynamic exchange.

 

 

Because the paintings are worked on over time, that exchange shifts one day to the next. With each fresh encounter, I incorporate that day’s perspective into the painting. The resolved painting then contains contradictory elements within its singularity.

 

 

The historic paintings that speak to me the most invoke a visceral response. Standing in front of a painting by Francis Bacon, I’m not critiquing, I’m falling.

 

 

I hope that my paintings can articulate something of the experience of being human. So that the viewer, in seeing, is somehow remembering having a vague memory made flesh.

 

 

I really believe that the function of art is to make us feel less alone.

 

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