A multi-year photographic project by Baltimore artist Jo Brown. The project plays with ideas
of intention, time, and meaning, and is inspired by Italo Calvino, "A Sign in Space" in his
collection of ancient-modern fables, Cosmicomics. I am intrigued by the lack of control that
any artist has over the received meaning of the work. We invest meaning into things that was
not intended, and we fail to see meaning that was. By focusing on this kind of uncertainty,
I hope to foster my ability to understand what is meant (and what is not) by others, and to
allow that my meanings will always be both more, and less, than I intend.

. . .

The Land of Why

"Sometime recently, without much fanfare, Ezra crossed over into the land of "Why?"
He's increasingly familiar with the territory."
D.L., Sunday, May 11, 2014 Mothers' Day

So here you are:
a shadow no longer amusement
but a reason to look
for the thing itself;
a reason no longer
'because'
but a new question
you will ask;
and talk no longer what washes over you
the air you breathe
the comb in your hair
the rough washcloth on your unwilling face
but what you will make and move and seek and find

-- Jo Brown ©2014

America: digital photographs by American abstract realist Jo Brown, 2012-15.

I want to honor the beauty in people and things as they appear, unposed, unrepaired, unselfconscious. All of the people in this series of photographs are listening to the blues. They are making intergenerational commitments to this quintessentially American genre. Because I see this, I am unconvinced by the almost weekly declarations that, as older musicians pass away, "We have lost the last real bluesman." That is not how music, or culture, or beauty work. We are compelled to recognize, honor, and reproduce it. You can see the careful attention being paid by the audience in these portraits. You can see the importance of the music to the parents of the children, the urgency of their attentiveness. This is important. The blues will never die.

. . .


Edge


There was not a cloud in the sky
to threaten rain
when you stopped and tipped
your big purple umbrella forward;

I had just bought chocolates for Easter;
you looked up at the mackerel sky;

and so your smooth face
above your grand parasol
looked like the bunny
with its ears bitten off
only beautiful;

and you,
you looked like the
tightrope walker
walking the edge of the
black, wet asphalt.

-- Jo Brown, ©2009

"Accidentals" are my shorthand for a combination of deliberate constructions and makeshift repairs that change over time with the random efffects of wear and weather, vandalism, and other forms of violence or decomposition. These are "found collages" of three dimensions, photographed into two. The photographs are a testament to the dignity and beauty of skilled work, even in decay, the depredations of time, and the labors of repair, restoration, and preservation. I think of the work of Willie Cole, in his use of an iron's scorch to simultaneously invoke domestic work and the schematic of a slave ship. My recording this damaged and lost skilled manual labor is an effort, a small gesture, toward justice. Influenced by Georges Braque, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Jean Arp, Walker Evans, Saul Leiter and Willie Cole. The compositions, like much of my work, share an ambiguous play between tactile surface and empty space.

. . .

Beat

I heard you from a block away
to my great relief.
Surely, a good sign, that
the marching band is marching today.
Complete with the blue and orange uniforms
that don’t really fit,
all the more to show
your beauty.

You could not possibly know how I
admire you,
bass drummer,
your practice,
just that you do this thing
in Baltimore
is something of a miracle to me.

So you could not have known, then, could you?
how it stilled my heart to have you
stare in white-hot fury at me,
and crack the drum like a gunshot aimed at
whoever you imagine me to be,
pale woman
squinting on the sidelines
frankly respecting your life,
and longing for a way
to make amends.

-- Jo Brown ©2015
Baltimore

"Concessions" is a series of digital color photographs focusing on oblique angles by Baltimore abstract realist Jo Brown.

I started work as a sculptor, and this informs all of my painting and photography. The photos in this series play on the forms and ideas that I associate with concessions, compromises, and adjustments.

Stand

And there they are:
a row of rural-delivery mailboxes, standing black and sober, shoulder to shoulder
leaning in a motley row
inside dense thicket by the creek.

So close, with no footing for a dirt road to ride along that bank;
no beaten path to their horseshoe doors, gaping, their red flags dipped,
but the tendrils of honeysuckle and poison ivy,
the umbrellas of mayapples,
the tiny Christmases of club mosses,
the gifts of chipmunks,
bittersweet,
and the flick of a mockingbird's tail.

Did they arrive here shouldered as a prank by some fool boys,
tired of firecrackers and baseball bats?

Did they wash up in a flood, miraculously righted, like drunken sailors,
arms slung around rough necks, careening side to side?

Or are they what remains, the last stand of that family,
the wife, who planted the King Alfred daffodils and the pink azalea
that keep them company still, to the veery's lovely song,
now that the children are grown and gone?

-- Jo Brown, copyright 2013

My still-life paintings are conceived as portraits, and they are part of my search for beauty in everyday life. I have gradually turned from seeking beautiful objects to paint, toward finding the beauty in imperfect, flawed, and discarded things. This approach can provoke powerful emotional responses to the works. Light and attachment, distance and solitude, are the emotional threads that bind these works together. I intend these to be instructive, both for myself and for the viewer, in that they urge the us to seek and value beauty in the ordinary. Beauty repairs the world, and learning to see it in unlikely places helps prepare us for the work of rectifying wrongs and preventing injuries to one another. If we are satisfied with little, and small things bring joy, then there will be enough to go around.

. . .

Enough

Slowly,
she fills full
the plain glass with milk
seated,
she eats.
Touching the crumbs,
she gathers
her life,
and
decides,
enough.


ca. 1969

Horizon: digital color photographs by American abstract realist Jo Brown, 2011-2015. The images in this series have in common luminous color and ambiguous spatial and emotional relations, creating illusions of space and air where there is none, dissolving apparently solid form into nothingness, and calling attention to the accidental beauty of neglected places. Like the open-air paintings, they reveal specific atmospheric conditions of light and air, while pushing the image toward abstraction. This play generates an element of sometimes comic surprise for the viewer, in discovering that things are not what they seem. These riddles are another part of the disciplined learning that is the real work of art.

. . .

Last year


No piping plovers,

not one

not

1.


-- Jo Brown ©2013


. . .

Announcement

Light in slow motion, cry
midst seagrass
scuttled crabs, periwinkles, sea pickles,
fleet fish, cutfoot shells
a whole great
egg of air beneath each wing
you drift down large
silent
disappear still
before
my very
eyes

-- Jo Brown ©2013

I completed most of this work at the water's edge in and around Wellfleet, Orleans, and Truro, Massachusetts, Cape Cod, USA. These are oil on canvas board, painted en plein air, alla prima, in September and October, 2010-2015. The approach carefully witnesses the specifics of time, place, weather, light, and form, while the compositions deliberately push abstraction. Just as the first painting, "Battlefield" shows an idyllic scene that belies the horro of the conflict there, the other scenes mask hidden violence: of the natural collisions between air, land and water; the life and death of living creatures; the destructive forces of human exploitation of these resources. By knowing their fierce beauty, we may train ourselves in better husbandry.

. . .

Low tide, salt marsh, cold morning

You and yours
of a feather, you

took my breath away in an
early morning

all, each, balanced on one
perfectly still yellow stalk

each mirrored in the still
blue white dips of water, taupe
stripes of sand

so still as if to know
your own weightless beauty
in my eyes,

as close to infinity
as we ever hope to come

2013

"Fragile" is an ongoing series of waterscape paintings, in oil, documenting and celebrating endangered wetlands, bird sanctuaries, and salt marshes in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, the Cape Cod Bay, and the Cape Cod National Seashore. Refined naturalist observation married to abstract composition reworks the conventions of open-air landscape painting, charging us to see this fragile beauty in a powerful new light, and find a fierce motive for protecting it. It is not "ours" to waste.

. . .

Sunfish

You had no idea that today
would be your last
that perched upon the mast
of your namesake
sails furled the osprey spied
you below
sailing your wet way along
with your schoolmates
under Uncle Tim's Bridge
and back again in and out
of the sea pickles
dodging the green heron

No

you could not have known
that pierced and gasping
you would take flight
unwitting and in your
last gasp at last
would see the sights of
Wellfleet as you
sail by the clock
that keeps ships' time
and over me helpless
watching
from below




-- Jo Brown
©September 2013

I live in a great waterfront city, surrounded by the largest estuary in the world, where many city residents have never seen the bay or the ocean. Increasingly, access to unspoiled places of natural beauty is out of reach. We injure and punish one another by depriving each other of this basic necessity.

Because beauty itself has the power to command our respect and attention, and to compel us to protect it, the celebration of natural beauty in our environment is a too-often neglected language for advancing the causes of environmental and social justice.

The discipline entailed in painting trains us to see, and seeing is a requirement for empathy. If I cannot become what I paint, I cannot get it down. If I cannot see you, I cannot feel your pain, or your joy.

. . .

Forecast

avert your eyes
to what you have already seen
what you have never seen
the lady too tired,
too poor, too heavy of heart
to move
the man too old, too hard, too black
to save
they are washed
they are washed to your shore
they are washed to your door

avert your eyes because
you know they were
here before
write your check
and send it far away
keep them fed and watered
for a day

avert your eyes because you know
they were here before
go back to work
go back to school
tell yourself you have done
what you could

avert your eyes,
order is restored
the tide is turning and
the sea is at your door

August 2005
In memory of the more than 1,000 uncounted children washed away by "Katrina"

The paintings in this project depict the growing impact of sea-level rise on the endangered waterscapes of Cape Cod, Massachusetts and the Chesapeake Bay.  Each is completed alla prima, in a single sitting, outdoors, on a single day.  These works document a rapidly-disappearing coastline and the beauty that will soon be lost.
Beauty compels us to honor and protect it.