Carol Brown

1937- Present

American (United States, Tucson, Arizona)

Carol Brown's lifelong interest in landscape began in childhood on many summer trips crossing the country in a car with her parents. During the rest of the year she lived on Long Island, travelling on Saturdays to the Art Students League in New York City to draw from live models and dead vegetables and pots. When she was sixteen, she went to Cornell University, which had not only an art department but also fine landscape, good music and Far Eastern studies departments, Vladimir Nabokov on the faculty, and Buckminster Fuller in residence. After graduating with two scholarships, a faculty award for being first in her class, and a B.F.A. degree, she went to Provincetown to study with Hans Hofmann and then to New York City, where she haunted the museums and galleries, took classes at the Art Students League and the Brooklyn Museum Art School, won the Max Beckmann and Frank Vincent Dumond Awards, and married photographer Dean Brown. 
Carol Brown's first exhibitions at the Sidney Janis and Richard Feigen Galleries in New York City, and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and museums across the country, were multi-media events that combined lights, photos, drawings and, in some cases, performance. A study of Navajo and Hopi ceremonies led her to the Southwest, where she made studies for paintings for several group shows at The Witkin and Allan Stone Galleries, and two single shows at the Roko Gallery, all in New York City. After her husband's death in 1973 she returned to the Southwest to concentrate on working directly from nature in wilderness settings. The sketches, which had previously been preliminaries for other work, became more and more important in themselves. Brown's long study of Eastern philosophies, combined with her research into Native American religion, and a formal training in Zen Buddhism developed in her the conviction that her immediate reaction to whatever she was seeing was what belonged on the paper. The drawings, labelled as to time and place of execution, became her diaries and made up her next three solo shows at The Witkin Gallery in New York and the Bahti Gallery in Tucson, Arizona. 
Over the years Brown has written articles on sculpture and photography which have appeared in Arts, and other magazines and books. Her drawings are included in Drawing--Space, Form, and Expression by Wayne Enstice and Melody Peters. In 1987 her drawings were published along with her writing about her experience in the Southwest.
In the past Brown travelled to China, Hong Kong, Japan, Nepal, Thailand, Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, Mexico, Canada, Puerto Rico, The Virgin Islands, Alaska, Hawaii and forty-one of the lower forty-eight states. At present Brown divides her time between the East Coast and the Southwest, where she draws and paints in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Much of her time is spent in a red truck, in the national parks and other wilderness areas.