(selected by Steven McKenzie)
Just Add Milk, 2006
'Gordon Brown's vast paintings combine fish and fowl, flora and fauna, in bright colours as though Hieronymus Bosch was designing sets for Balamory'. (Moira Jeffrey, The Herald, Glasgow, 2006).
Inverness-based artist Gordon Robin Brown makes satirical and surreal paintings which combine a curious mix of elegance, humour and eroticism. The works pose bizarre narrative scenes depicting a strange, compromised paradise where both human and animal characters are set in private folkloric ensembles against vast expanses of colour. The large-scale acrylic paintings and small ink watercolours are drawn with a clarity of line and refined draughtsmanship; ideas come through doodling and sketching, often drawn directly onto canvas with no predetermined plan. Brown works instinctively, responding to ideas as they suggest themselves as he works. In one painting, it seems as though the world of Beatrix Potter has collided with The Joy of Sex. He likes to bewilder the viewer, offering no possible solution to the riddle he conjures.
Brown's Open Frequency nominator, artist and curator Steven McKenzie writes, 'A baboon on top of a children's slide, a polar bear supporting a figure with a bird mask grabbing a bird from a stripy coloured tree; a large white rabbit having its ear cut off by a pink man wearing a surgical mask; a bird, penguins, fish, geckos, and other small and large human figures dressed up in animal costumes or as trees - all co-habit in the strange world of Gordon Brown's paintings.
'Nursery Rhymes for Bed Wetters' is a large body of work addressing Brown's interest in the hierarchy of humans and animals, and playfully creates scenarios that undermine the control that the humans have in this world. The humour or gleeful perversion in the paintings is achieved by inverting roles and authority between humans and animals and delivers a multitude of narratives that no one answer can deduce. These narratives reflect Brown's working process of collaging many ideas together to create bizarre and unusual scenarios - a rhino's mask hung out to dry on a washing line, a pile of frogs being hugged by miniature people, a miniature man dancing with a huge snail. Brown's work is littered with an expandable narrative and is substantiated by a proficient foundation of drawing and painting'.
Biography
Gordon Brown (b. 1984, Thurso) graduated with a first class Fine Art Degree from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee in 2006. Whilst a student he was awarded the Sandra McNeilance memorial prize for drawing and painting in 2006, and later received an Edinburgh Printmakers graduate publishing commission during 2006/7.
Recent exhibitions include the Royal Scottish Academy Annual Show, Edinburgh (2007) for which he was awarded the RSA Latimer award, Glasgow Art Fair (2007), The Society of Scottish Artists Open, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2007), Sealladh 1, a two-man show with Alan Begg, An Tuireann, Portree, Skye (2007), Watercolour and Drawings Fair, Royal Academy, Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London (2007) and the London Art Fair with Rebecca Hossack Gallery (2007).
Brown is currently showing in the RSA Edinburgh's As Others See Us - Portraits from the Highlands, from 30 June 29 July, where twelve artists have been invited to create both a self portrait and a portrait of another artist. He lives and works in Inverness.
Links
www.gordonrobinbrown.co.uk
www.antuireann.org.uk
