The Mystery of the Ordinary in New York
Tina Kesting
Judith Gwyn Brown has been illustrating the pages of children’s books since her early 20s. Since then, she has illustrated more than forty books and written four of her own, and her works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library and the Boston Public Library. Seven years ago though, she decided she needed a new challenge. She began to paint. Brown wanted to bring the quotidian life of her beloved New York to canvas. It felt like a good time to do it: the art scene seemed open once again to figurative scenes and narrative after the dominance of pop art and abstraction started to wane.
Brown has now left the illustrated pages of storytelling but continues to make illustrative narratives. Her paintings and drawings, which have been featured by a Japanese television show New Yorkers, capture men and women frozen in ambiguous, intimate moments. Brown believes that "the sense of a new story is clearer in black and white photography than in color photography." Accordingly, Brown’s palette is primarily a gray scale geometry of light and shadow. By using the pureness of the noncolors black and white as she renders the mood of the city, architecturally and emotionally, Brown is able to concentrate on the intimacy of the scene and on the tension between the sexes, and between people and the built environment.
The eerie light on the men and women in Brown’s paintings turns ordinary situations into dramatic scenes. The smooth shapes of these figures seem to stand in stark contrast to the harsh architecture of the city. But the thick brush strokes and cloudy muted hues address the human shapes so softly and attentively that the figures appear to melt into the architectural forms.
"New York is such a fairy tale, and such a myth," Brown told me in an interview, because of its storied diversity. She says this has "it replaces the myth and fables of previous times." Brown paints curiosity and intrigue into her city-shapes. She plays with the fantasies people create when they see the city–the shadows dancing on a tall building, the breaking of light, the reflecting waters of the Hudson and the East River, the facades of old and new houses. Brown has the feeling that because of this mystery of shapes, lights, and shadows there is a strange sort of yearning in the city.
Brown says that these imagined situations "represent the emotional intensity of intimacy in the city. Yet the atmosphere is created by paint: thin glazes, transparent and flowing, are set off by smoky shadows, some rough and grainy, brushed across the canvas, contrasted by the high brilliance of light."
In Brown’s oil painting In Elevator, a man in an elevator of the Fuller Building holds a folder of art works under his arm, a woman stands beside him, pressing the elevator button. Behind the couple is a grand mirror, in which the couple is mirrored and repeated infinitely. To produce this reflection, there must be a second, invisible mirror on the opposite wall, at the position where the observer stands. This two-mirror-effect might stand for the endlessness of time people feel being in an elevator. But the endlessness also underlines the commonness of such a daily situation. When caught in a small space, in a transitional moment, en route from one place to place another, one wonders: Who is the other person? What would happen if the elevator got stuck? Brown underlines the peculiarity of these situations–moments that seem to be so ordinary. She creates a conversational composition, weaving an entire narrative into one frame.
Another of Brown’s paintings also plays with the two-mirror effect. The work In The Restaurant: Reflections shows a man and a woman, sitting face to face at a table that is placed in front of a mirror. The couple are drinking champagne, talking… and mirrored endlessly. This double reflection gives the viewer the possibility to see more of the scene: a waiter bringing another glass of champagne, paintings on the wall. The scene is framed by light yellow colors, so it’s as if the couple are on stage, spotlighted. The couple’s reflection repeats in endless iterations–implying the endlessness of conversation, the endless facets and complications of relationships, the endless shapes of a city.
Brown’s paintings tell stories. She explains: "I am an illustrator and I’m used to thinking in terms of text. My mind works in a literary and narrative way." She says that "Now, people are yearning for narratives." Often she paints as a way of recording: her canvas becomes a receptacle for memory and experience, sometimes scenarios that Brown has just seen or participated in.
One night, on her way home from seeing Hamlet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, she started to paint her work At the Theater. Seeing Hamlet. This became part of the grey scale cityscape series. This oil on canvas painting in black, white–and yellow, the bonus color–shows a typical theater scene from the perspective of the auditorium. People sitting in the first rows are watching the action unfold on the stage. A woman towards the back, whose hair is reflecting the light, is looking at an actor with her lorgnette on the pulpit–the actor is also bathed in light. Brown is referring to the 1879 painting At the Theater by the American Impressionist Mary Cassatt, whose pastel work presents a woman sitting in the auditorium in a front of a mirror, wearing a yellow dress and being illuminated by the light. But Brown does not only focus on a woman in the theater, she goes further and discovers the hidden voyeurism that exists between human beings, especially in theaters. She not only tells invented stories, she also reflects on real life situations and events and goes deeper into the meaning and mood.
Brown also draws inspiration from biblical stories, atmosphere from fairy tales and imagery from Greek and Russian iconography. We can see these influences in Natural History: The Planets. The work not only shows the beginnings of civilization in contrast to the beginnings of nature and of the universe, it also presents the variety of perspectives from which life can be seen. Here again, Brown plays with the effects of light and shadow: a skeleton of a dinosaur and a woman standing in the door are covered in sunlight, whereas the foreground is dark, and we see only the shadow of a man descending the stairs. This is an unusual way of telling a story in a painting: art history has familiarized us with looking in the foreground for the main action. Brown wants to draw the viewer’s attention to the dark and hidden meaning of life and away from the surface.
Brown would like to see herself in the tradition of European Expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Georg Grosz, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. Though her technique is different, her goal is similar: she presents the world from a very particular viewpoint. And reminds us that there is more than only one perspective in life. Life is variable in its wholeness. And whole in its variety. After years spent between the pages of books, Brown now brings vivdly the fantasies, mysteries and fairy tales people dream, onto intriguing canvases.
