The Wedding Tray
D.P. Brown 1968
Daniel Price Erichsen Brown, painter, printmaker (b at Forestville, Ont 21 Aug 1939). D.P. Brown's interest in art was sparked on frequent childhood sketching trips with A.Y. JACKSON and Will OGILVIE near Georgian Bay, and continued on his annual vacation visits to the great art collections of Europe while studying abroad. He was encouraged by Lawren P. HARRIS to return to Canada in 1958 to study at Mount Allison with Alex COLVILLE. After graduating in 1961 Brown moved back to Ontario to paint full-time.
The wide variety of his subject matter appears to be the mundane familiarity of his rural surroundings recorded with an almost photographic accuracy. But closer examination reveals the creation of carefully controlled compositions with a larger purpose - hidden juxtapositions, relationships and comparisons of intense philosophical insight and social commentary in the tradition of the finest classical and Renaissance masters he so greatly admires.
His major works include images of farmers and city dwellers interacting at a farm auction (The Auction, 1975); the nude artist startled by a skeleton hanging in a doctor's office (Nude and Skeleton, 1978); a majorette posing too proudly before a draped Canadian flag (The Twirler, 1979); and aging Orangemen parading past a monolithic Catholic church (Orangemen's Parade, 1984; seeORANGE ORDER).
He paints exclusively with egg tempera and prints all his serigraph stencils by hand, creating one composition at a time and producing a total of only 3 or 4 works per year. In 1985 he was the subject of a 6-city retrospective exhibition: "D.P. Brown; Twenty Years."
I can see the Colville influence.
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