Shotgun Review
A Gardener’s Notebook
September 11, 2010Does gardening breed patience, or do only patient people end up gardening? The same might be asked of paintings like Christopher Brown’s. The artist cultivates such tolerance for the mundane with these works. The show is named after a gardener’s notebook—that place where one scrambles to keep track of what matters, to record moments of simplicity and clarity despite their fleeting nature, and where one attempts to grasp what is, in the end, chaotic and unpredictable.
Groups of flowers, trees, marching bands, and soldiers populate Brown’s works, signifying the daily presence of mystery, memory, order, and instability. They’re not so much about the artist’s life in consciousness, but rather the transformation of underlying streams of thoughts into something more permanent and impressive. These paintings are downright dreamy: faces are blurred, the weather is always sunny, and odd little paintings are attached with hinges to the sides of other, disparate works—like unrelated post-scripts in a letter. These sculptural additions are not entirely related to anything, but are, like most of Brown’s work, satisfying in their indulgent qualities. Furthermore, the cast of characters is nondescript and the buildings and trees are recurring. While there is a persistent narrative thread, it’s never quite figured out, and there is a freshness in the brushstrokes—they’re casual and unworried, as if Brown was indeed just painting on a notebook.
The artist purports that his works are like pages from a mental notebook—recorded in fits and starts, littered with apparitions and poetics and interchangeable recurring characters. While this is not the most groundbreaking idea in modern painting, viewers cannot deny the conviction that Brown demonstrates in
Sails & Sea II, 2010; oil on linen, 80 x 80 in. Courtesy of the Artist and John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco.
his works; it’s a belief that he so obviously has in his subjects and in their negotiability. The artist’s project is to commemorate his own glimpses of the boring, the mysterious and the sacred in every day. He has a common veneration for such glimpses, but what propels him forward as an artist is to keep painting them. It’s not so much the inherent mystery of the everyday moments; it’s that they’ve been translated into paintings with such assurance that keeps Brown’s audience looking, wondering, and believing.