WALTER BROWN

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Creating a painting is an exhilarating event for me. My paintings live in the present moment and are political in the sense that they represent my reaction to the current world situation in all its complexity, with both its ugliness and beauty. With reliance on imagination and memories, the paintings acknowledge the nonlinearity of temporal events and employ spontaneity as an element in their creation. They recapitulate and transform visual microscopic memories accumulated from more than four decades of biopsy interpretation as a pathologist. I appropriate the ubiquitous circle as a stand-in for the body’s cells and as an avatar which can freely morph as needed. 

Nature’s fractal organization allows the microscopic world to become a take-off for additional explorations. As scale varies, a broader realm develops in reaction to the strict scientific order that of necessity dominated the way I formerly interpreted the world. I can now revel in an artistic freedom that welcomes chaos and disorder.  The paintings show a fictionalized   loose transcription, with control and discipline in dialogue with randomization and freedom. 

WHO AM I ANYWAY (Bio)

While I enjoyed my career as a physician (pathologist), I was not fully satisfied. When interpreting biopsies, I would occasionally notice the beautiful patterns and colors of the microscopic world. Of course, given the seriousness of the work, no allowances were given to aesthetic considerations. The focus, of necessity, was entirely on seeing the medical/diagnostic aspects.

In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, I re-evaluated my goals. I decided to take beginner’s art lessons and discovered that I could actually create artwork. During this period, I kept my medical and artistic lives separate.  Artistic endeavors were limited to classes and workshops on nights and weekends. 

In 2022 I stopped working as a pathologist, and enrolled full-time in the MFA program of the New York Studio School. There I found my artistic voice by acknowledging the influence of decades of microscopic observation.  Because of nature’s fractal organization, microscopic images also offer scaled views of the larger world. The basic unit is small, and builds up organically, as if from a cellular level, to eventually form dynamic compositions.  

The journey is ongoing and expansive. I find myself at the interface between art and science, fantasy and reality. I intermix literal interpretations of microscopic depictions with abstract representations, that freely and exuberantly extend beyond visual memories.