For several years Alan Brown was a picture framer in Westchester County, New York. His current body of work focuses heavily on using that same skill set, this time utilizing curious found objects, often items that have long outlived their known purpose or identity. The artist’s work encompasses sculptures, collages, and paintings; all created with the idea of reconstructing, enhancing, and reassembling as its central theme, not so much to discover the finished product, but rather for the basis of being enveloped in its process. Compositionally and with academic markers, the finished work gives new life to what is otherwise considered a collection of old childhood memories, and new and repurposed materials. Objects such as old frames, African sculpture, pages from 19th-century books, forgotten tools, and antique toys live collectively in Mr. Brown’s often satirical compositions. The artist develops multi-layers of colliding narratives as a draftsman; the finished work is both playful and introspective, in that the artist sees the possibility of the materials and the reinvention of the “forgotten object” while also offering a bit of Homage to the very material he reworks and saves from oblivion.
American, b.1947
