Education:

Educated in fine arts at Yale, I studied sculpture with Erwin Hauer, painting with Bernard Chaet and William Bailey. I also studied photography, specializing in large-format, archaic photographic techniques.  At Yale I appreciated the work of  photographers Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Walker Evans,  painters Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, and Edward Hopper. At MICA, I had the opportunity to study with Joe Giordano, a student of Fairfield Porter. I am self-taught as a landscape painter, however, and look to Fitz Hugh Lane, John Frederick Kensett, Mary Cassatt, Edouard Vuillard, Giorgio Morandi, Mark Rothko, and the Dutch and Flemish seascape painters as major influences. 

Artist's Statement:

Beauty repairs the world. Whether naturally or humanly created, and however imperfect, beauty compels us to protect it. In this obligation lies a powerful foundation for both social and environmental justice.  The landscapes feature Chesapeake and Cape Cod wildlife sanctuaries, fishing grounds, and threatened estuaries, as well as historic battlefields. Their strong horizons, shifting light, photographic clarity, spare compositions and fragile subjects parallel the ideas in the still life paintings. 

Each painting, regardless of subject matter, reads as both a portrait and a landscape, in that each records the painter’s attempt to honor the subject’s fleeting beauty, precisely and truly, while at the same time marking a place in time. The power of the renderings is in deliberate contrast to the fragility of the subjects, to provoke the viewer to consider the meanings of strength, change, permanence, and trust.

I work in oil on canvas mounted on archival board, using a non-toxic orange-based medium, and completing the works in a single sitting, on site ("alla prima.") I consider my work abstract realism rather than “plein air,” in part because I am a bit more deeply immersed in the landscape itself, away from the built environment, than many plein-air painters seem to be. I think of the landscape paintings as a marriage between Rothko and Kensett, and the still-life work as a liaison between Morandi and Strand.  

I am often asked whether I paint from photographs.  While making photographs is a vital part of my life as an artist, painting from a still image bears little of the exhilaration for me that open-air work holds.  I will, however, usually at a client’s request, translate a small open-air painting into larger studio works, which translation remarkably retains much of the intensity of field painting.

I am continuing a series of commissioned portraits of great bluesmen from the environs of Clarksdale, MS.  This series brings me back to my beginnings as a portrait painter. The first is a portrait of the late, great  Big Jack "The Oilman" Johnson, of The Jellyroll Kings.  David "Honeyboy" Edwards, Joseph William "Pinetop" Perkins,  and  Wesley "Junebug" Jefferson will also be honored in this series.

Recent shows:
Solo shows: 

School 33 Open Studio Tour, Baltimore, MD, October 2014

School 33 Open Studio Tour, Baltimore, MD, October 2013

"Jo Brown: New Paintings," curated by Michael Owen, Milk and Honey, Baltimore, MD, USA, 2012

School 33 Open Studio Tour, Baltimore, MD, USA, 2012

"Fragile: New Work by Jo Brown," Gallery 1448, Baltimore, MD, USA, 2010. 

"light; heat: twenty arguments against war,"  paintings by Jo Brown, Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, 2003

"light; air," paintings by Jo Brown, Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, 2002

Group shows: 

Blue Heron Gallery, Wellfleet, MA, ongoing

“Sweet’Art” Tenth Anniversary Show, Area 405, Baltimore, MD, February 2013

"2012 Baker Artist Award Show," Baltimore, MD, USA, October 2012

"Art with a Heart Staff Show," Baltimore, MD, USA, Fall 2012

"Surroundings: Recent Work by Jo Brown, Greg Fletcher, and Leslie Schwing," Gallery 1448, Baltimore, MD, USA, Winter 2011-2012.

Wayne Plein Air Festival Exhibition, Wayne, PA, Summer 2011

"Still Life," curated by Lisa Coddington, Rouse Company Foundation Gallery, Horowitz Center for the Arts, Columbia, MD, USA,  July 9-August 9, 2009, an exhibition of works by Mary J. Arthur, Joan Brady, Jo Brown and Victoria Restrepo.

"Landscape," curated by Kini Collins, Rouse Company Foundation Gallery, Horowitz Center for the Arts, Columbia, MD, USA, 2008. Works by Penny Bamford, Jo Brown, Cinder Hypki, Laura Vernon Russell, Martha Simons, and Lyndie Vantine.

Galleries:

Area 405, Baltimore, MD; Blue Heron Gallery, Wellfleet, MA; Gallery 1448, Baltimore, MD; Left Bank Gallery, Wellfleet, MA; Left Bank Gallery, Orleans, MA; Arts at 510, Harrisburg, PA; Rouse Company Foundation Gallery, Columbia, MD; Wayne Art Center, Wayne, PA.

Private Collections:

Work is held in many private collections, in San Francisco, CA, Santa Monica, CA, Santa Barbara, CA, Baltimore, MD, Harrisburg, PA, Gladwyne, PA; Philadelphia, PA, Wayne, PA, New York City, NY; Southhampton, MA, Martha's Vineyard, MA, Wellfleet, MA,  Clarksdale, MS; Somerville, NJ; Atlanta, GA, Richmond, VA; Middlebury, VT.