James Brown at Grant Selwyn - New York - Brief Article

Certain passages in James Brown's recent drawings seem to emerge from their supports like rubbings from a tombstone, revealing the artist's interest in process and the inherent possibilities of found materials. In the first section of this two-part exhibition, Brown's blunt strokes of dark pastel bristle at the edges of latent, embryonic forms and sweep across fields of grid-marked linen with the repetitive insistence of a burin cutting metal. While these drawings consequently resemble engravings in the manner of their execution, they also allude, in their imagery, to microscopic cultures, cartographic topography, Paleolithic drawings or cosmic constellations.

Brown develops these large, biomorphic drawings on the reverse (fabric) side of found travelers' maps whose printed surfaces were once fixed leaf by leaf (or block by block) to the flexible surface of seamless cloth, which was then folded along the edges of the leaves for storage and ease of reference. In the case of Brown's drawings, the backing fabric is an old if not antique linen of considerable elegance and slight patina, creased in three-tiered folds of as many as eight paper blocks across. In each example, the faded thread evidences the slight irregularities of denier that are consistent with the appearance of natural linen broadcloth, while the occasionally translucent separations between the mounted paper sections emphasize the structure and enhance the inherent luminosity of a most unusual support. Brown obsessively scores On the Edge of Darkness (2000) in the allover manner common to this first suite of drawings, then lightly shades-in subtle passages of blue-violet and golden-ocher pastel. Each stroke adds another element to the tessellated activity that surrounds and defines a uterine shape and embryonic form at the drawing's core, invoking a Paleolithic animal effigy. If the cartography of The White Kid Finger (2000) suggests the palisades of a fortification, the stippled pastels and worked-up fields of Second Sight (2000) begin to resolve into the inclined bust of some recumbent figure.

Brown attached the exhibition's title, "The Eye of the Violet," to each of the 13 remaining drawings, also pastel on linen and roughly 10 by 8 inches each. As though enjoying the intimacy of their support, he elaborated dominant biomorphic shapes that range from the petals of a flower to an impending collision of celestial trash to the hogback hump of some continent's divide. His control of palette seems most evident in this suite. Each drawing is the singular achievement of an intuitive sensibility imposed on an imaginatively material world.

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