Gabe Brown applies an intuitive approach to her investigations of the natural world creating richly layered paintings that combine gestural free association with passages of crisp detail. Since the early 1990s, she has created dynamic and colorful abstract paintings based in nature, primarily in oil and acrylic, in addition to works on paper and wood, which convey a sense of wonder at the magic of the universe. Exploring a world beyond tangible reality, Brown searches for meaning in the unknown. The artist writes: “Art is like magic, an illusion created by the force of humanity. Our choices in life can be amazing portals for adventure. For me, these possibilities present themselves through the process of painting: researching potent images, configuring them on canvas, and struggling to imbue them with a sense of myself and my own wonder at the enormous complexity of the world.”
Brown’s multilayered paintings combine a narrative of personal experience with colorful landscapes where geometric forms mix with the natural and man-made worlds of birds, ships and swirling, teardrop rainbows. She looks for the extraordinary in the ordinary, discerning the detail of things often overlooked. For Brown paint takes on the quality of primal clay from which an infinite range of shapes and forms can emerge. From striated grounds of earthy color, bright patches might coalesce into cells, seeds or streams. Plant forms take root with traced lines that can suggest the diagram of a family tree or a chemical notation. Nature and those elements existing in its microcosm become metaphors for a strange and, at times, super reality, a parallel universe that questions the natural scheme of life itself.
Using a visual vocabulary derived from a world that often goes unnoticed, Brown begins to reinvent reality. Everyday events such as conversations between birds, forces that drive water, or the cellular structure of plant life are starting points for paintings that become conversations between nature and the man-made. “I can see, and show, that the natural world is not unlike our own man-made realm, an alternate universe filled with an active power to recognize desire, temptation, and frailty.”
Gabe Brown was born in Tucson, Arizona and raised in New York City. Brown holds her BFA degree from The Cooper Union in New York City and an MFA degree in Painting from the University of California, Davis. Brown is a 2018 recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting and Sustainable Arts Foundation Award. In late 2023, she will be a Resident Fellow at Virginia Center for Contemporary Art in Amherst, VA and has been a past Resident Fellow at The Saltonstall Foundation, Spruce Residency, Anderson Center at Tower View, and Women’s Studio Workshop. Her paintings and works on paper have been exhibited nationally in galleries and museums such as Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Sears-Peyton Gallery, The Chautauqua Institute, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, Butters Gallery, Matteawan Gallery, Adah Rose Gallery, The Saratoga Arts Center, Garrison Arts Center, John Davis Gallery, ArtsWestchester, Schweinfurth Arts Center, SUNY Brockport, The Horticultural Society of New York, and the Albany International Airport. Her work is included in both public and private collections. Brown has been an Adjunct Professor in Painting and Drawing at Fordham University, SUNY New Paltz and Marist College. Gabe Brown lives and works on a sustainable farm in the Hudson Valley of New York.