conversation with Goya

ARTIST PROFILE Born in 1949 Tom Brown studied ceramics at Manchester in the early 1970’s. He moved to the Derbyshire Peak District in 1973 and built a workshop and a series of successful wood fired, salt glaze kilns. He taught Art in Buxton for many years and was head of Art department at Fenton College, Stoke on Trent before he moved to Spain where he now lives. His own work has always been incredibly important and he has exhibited and sold his pieces regularly. For a number of years now the emphasis in his work has shifted from ceramics and is now almost exclusively concerned with drawing and painting. Many years of caving and diving, running dogs, whisky and bagpipes, free flying and travelling in the mountains of Europe, Himalayas and China have created a rich tapestry of windswept and interesting experiences and an attitude which provides the background to his approach to painting. THE WORK The paintings look like observational studies but they are not simply what is seen by the eye. Considerations of emotional or imaginative response, a sense of the past and also an awareness of the whole process of painting play an essential part. A painting itself is an illusion but an illusion with a precedent. Generations of painted images have created a visual language which is familiar to us and we inevitably use it to read new Art. Making use of this language, the paintings move freely from painterly observations to a conscious acceptance, in fact pure self indulgence in their artificial nature. Sometimes the real is mixed with the imagined or the remembered, sometimes tromp l’oeil is combined with freely painted pattern. Games are played with the composition in the traditionally imposed rectangle. In the process of transferring the image from the real to the vertical surface of the canvas, which is conventionally seen at eye level, there can be a change in perception. Above all working directly from the subject still fires all the senses into a unique level of sensitivity, encouraging the intuitive and confining the intellectualizing to the whisky induced time between painting. Now living in Spain the future is exciting, a totally new place, new culture, new people and new ideas……........