Owen Brown

Owen Brown | Three Roses In Milk Bottles, From The Byzantium Series | 2025

You began as a classical musician before turning to painting. How has your musical background influenced your visual art practice?

An understanding of visual rhythm, and a deeper appreciation for abstraction.  For music that is not song, is abstract.

Your works are held in significant collections, from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to the Weisman Museum. How do you feel about the institutional reception of your work compared to private collectors?

Being in a museum secures bragging rights and make me more collectible, but I would rather my works find a more permanent spot on a wall than be warehoused and only trotted out for scholars or special exhibits.  That, so far, has been the fate of my pieces acquired by art institutions.

Owen Brown | Tulips In A Glass Vase, From The Byzantium Series | 2025

Could you share more about your experience with residencies, particularly how the environment at Black Mountain Ranch or Berlin’s Milchhof Kunstverein shaped your creative direction?

I find residencies clarifying in intention and valuable for finding new routes, or reinforcing and strengthening old ones.  I am determined by my environment – who is not?  When placed in a new, somewhat alien one, I am squeezed by different factors into something new.  So Black Mountain Ranch, with its mandate to “paint the ranch,” and its request to use, as much as possible, “natural” materials, found me painting mainly figuratively, with “natural” paints –  to better represent the timeless “now.”  The Milchhof, a stone’s throw from the Berlin Wall, pushed me in the direction of history, lost time, failing memory, and how could that be created but for its essence – not figurative but emotional, hence abstraction, for the “then.”  The Leipzig International Art Programme has offered me a three-month residency in 2026 and who knows?  Perhaps both of those elements will be combined then.

Owen Brown | Irises In Glass Vase From The Byzantium Series | 2025

In your Byzantium Series, you draw inspiration from Orthodox iconography. What did you find most powerful in this visual tradition, and how did you reinterpret it in your still lifes?

My shallow understanding is that post-Byzantine Orthodox church iconography operated in a condition of relative stasis, glorious visually though it was, prior to the works of the 16th century Albanian painter Onufri.  This at least as compared to the experimentation enjoyed by the West. I don’t mean to deny the unmistakable genius of the Russian Andrei Rublev, the transgressions of El Greco from the Cretan school, or the influence of  Venetian “corruption,” where an extraordinary exchange of traditions occurred.  But I think what most impresses me is the utterly didactic nature of these works, their call to worship, and their provision of an image which, end in itself, is also a shining gateway into the heavenly sphere.

You mentioned the challenge and allure of working with gold leaf. What do you think this material brings to your art that other mediums cannot?

Gold leaf is the glory of the heavens, both an artifact in itself and a symbol, redolent of religious mysticism equally in the Orthodox and Western Churches, and  Theravada Buddhism.  It’s an anchor into particular traditions and ways of knowing. Technically, for my own paintings, its reflectivity interrupts the “painting” – it provides a non-porous medium that refuses the transformation and depth of traditional glazing.  Its brilliance at the same time reminds us of painting’s artifice and through impermanence, obliquity and impermeability, throws into relief the temporality of figure, or even abstraction.

Owen Brown | Blues In 4 Glass Vases From The Byzantium Series | 2025

Many of your works play with layers of meaning—history, spirituality, and personal emotion. How do you balance these elements without overwhelming the viewer?

In part by concentrating on the formal composition of the painting.  What colors to use, their level of saturation, the narrative positioning within the picture frame, and either the espousal or the rejection of particular models of armature.  The technical is as important as the story – where are you going to place visually prominent elements, and for what purpose?  All of this, in theory, can serve to retard, retain, and reinforce the patience and interest of the viewer…  if they look carefully enough.  Or they might just give the painting a glance and walk right on by.

I have been doing this long enough that some of these systems are automatic – I don’t recognize that I’ve used them until the painting is considered finished and set aside for a few days.  Post this I can look with new eyes, and decide whether it is finished, and finished “correctly,” or not!  After which, it’s either varnished, or becomes a different painting.

Owen Brown | Blues And Whites In 2 Glass Vases From The Byzantium Series | 2025

You’ve lived and exhibited across the United States and Europe. How do different audiences respond to your art? Have you noticed cultural differences in interpretation?

European audiences, in particular German audiences, seem more attuned to historical references, more trained in the visual arts, and more willing to locate my paintings within a particular emotional context:  one critic pronounced that I was firmly within the tradition of “die Sehnsucht”, that is, longing.  Maybe so.  But this is all a matter of degree, and self-selection.  Art exhibits don’t attract a “mass” audience, perhaps they are more “mass” in the United States, less self-confident, less comfortable about their understanding of art historical topics and controversies, and so less willing to express an opinion.