REVIEWS
Appeared in the Los Angeles Times
Bursting with Youthful Energy
by Leah Ollman
Claire Browne's enchanting new works at the Newspace Gallery exude vitality – youthful vitality coming from a mature artist. Browne, who lives in L.A., received a bachelor's degree in English in 1959 and earned a master of fine arts from the Claremont Graduate School in 1973. Her drawings on canvas ("drawn paintings," according to the press release) feel fresh and alive, charmingly casual yet thoughtful.
There's some playful friction right from the start in Browne's choice of media. She draws in pencil on gessoed canvas, sort of a T-shirt and tux combination, the informal doodle sprawled over the formally prepared surface. Her marks are simple circles, outlined, filled in and often with a smaller dot within. Some are as small as the head of a pin and others the size of a fingerprint. They cluster and form chains, seemingly organically, accreting into dense, vibrant fields that often extend over the edges and onto the sides of the canvases.
The markings pulse with energy, at once microcosmic and macrocosmic. The images read equally well as either multiplying cells or celestial phenomena – or as neither, but rather as pure pattern and motion and color. The larger works (4 to 5 feet per side) are particularly radiant. "Crown," drawn in warm orange, pale pink, fuchsia and gray, gives the impression of a diaphanous blossom – perhaps the aurora borealis, perhaps the luminous veins of a jellyfish. "Ring" represents a garland of golden circles laced in pink and framed by a broader, irregular border of dots. Against the neutral, bright white surface, Browne's patterns float freely, unencumbered by definition, gravity, context. They hint of transcendent nature, in the way the luminous paintings of Sharon Ellis do, through the physical immediacy of extravagant beauty.
Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., (323) 469-9353, through May 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.
Review for the Newspace Gallery
by Andy Brumer
Claire Browne
by Andy Brumer
"Drawing," Paul Klee once declared, "is the probity of art," revealing his belief that--at least for him--drawing's immediacy represented a method and means of exploring his inner world. The fifteen color pencil drawings executed on gessoed canvas that comprise Claire Browne's exhibition titled Mind Time both elevate and celebrate drawing as an end in itself. Perhaps more importantly, the title points to ward a Bergsonian value of subjectivity (French Nobel laureate Henri Bergson (1859-1941) memorably argued that intuition is deeper than intellect--Ed). Here the structured and linear pacing of the clock and calendar, however rhythmic, give way to a more quantum driven and quirky experience of time as something abstract, erratic, unpredictable, sometimes circular and always metaphorical. Expressions such as "time stood still," "the hours flew by," or, "the movie dragged on," reveal the artist's assertion that Mind Time is not something academic or esoteric, but simply how people feel their existence most of their lives.
Yet Browne's work does more than explore time as its subject matter. It employs it as its modus operandi, capable of transporting the artist into a new dimension. Consider the following excerpt prepared by the gallery: "After gesso is applied to canvas, Claire Browne vacates her mind. From her studio she can see the city. She can watch sunlight and particles as she draws her response on the prepared canvas. Her circles, hand drawn, are fields of energy. . .Her circles become a language, an alphabet, a mindbridge to sensing and finally knowing, the inner invisible. . ."
Indeed, but Browne's self-induced and active daydreaming also produces extremely lovely and sensitive work that longs simply to be looked at. Each piece, which the artist designates with elemental and archetypal names, such as Shadow, Ring, Crown, and Lotus, presents amorphous groupings of doodled circles that both facilitate and welcome easy associations. Some suggest the random playfulness of irregularly shaped blood cells when viewed under a microscope, or cosmic balloons or stars, like the Aurora Borealis seen through psychedelic rose colored glasses. In other places these overflowing spheres coagulate into ecstatic bunches of Dionysian grapes. Or the more soothing ripples of water in the Japanese master Haikuist Basho's pond after the frog jumps in, with the timelessly existential sound the translators have settled on: "Plop!"
One is tempted to relate these intuitively drawn circles to mandalas, which springing from the unconscious symbolize the effort of a suffering psyche and soul to achieve balance and reformulate wholeness. However, with its explicit zeroing out of both foreground and background, Browne's work feels free of the jagged feelings of angst or even edginess. Rather it points in equal measure to the Impressionists' interest in how light shimmers and dances off of objects, and to the Surrealist's protean theater, where the life of the mind and time itself stand as two actors in a never ending play.