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Joan Brown Things in a Landscape No. 2 , 1959
Oil on canvas, 74 × 72 in. Collection of Susan and Larry Marx
One of Brown’s early mentors was the artist Elmer Bischoff, who encouraged her to paint what she saw around her. Here she chooses a landscape, delineated by the horizon and blue sky above and painted with a deliberately flattened perspective. While the nature of the “things” in Brown’s vista is ambiguous, her thick impasto gives them a weighty presence. It suggests the way in which any space can be transformed into a landscape, and that any object is inherently concrete and mysterious enough to be the subject of a painting. —HJ
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