Context

Roger Brown was born on December, 10, 1941 in Opelika, Alabama, bringing forth southern influences through his family and surrounding peers. Brown was raised in a very religious family, who attended multiple services a week, and a regularly attended bible-school. Brown, at a very young age showed interesting artistic style, being described as a very creative child, by his parents who highly encouraged Browns artistic ability in his youth. His religious aspect brought about influences of folk art, as well he developed an interest in Art Deco, and comic strips as well as having a ease of development toward freehand drawing.  After rejecting his initial college goals to become

a preacher at Lipscomb University, he decided to pursue his art career instead, heading away from the South to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Browns years here had a huge influence on where he was to take his art career, obtaining influences of Pop Art, Surrealism and pre-Renaissance Italian art. Brown eventually developed in a group of artists, to create the Chicago Imagists. This group had heavy influences in Pop art, Commercial and Advertising art, and comics that were all figurative, narrative and surrealistic. This style completely went against the norms in the art field during the 1960’s period, which held as a mainly influenced Modernist abstract and conceptual style. Brown in his works often weighed in commentaries politically, and religiously and became known for it internationally where his work peeked around the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, installing popular culture influences of which he developed while in the Chicago Imagists. The Imagists never formed an actual art group, never adopted the name or even had a direct shared ideology, instead represented themselves solely through working independent of that of the norms of the time period. His first strong works came about through a set of “Disaster Landscapes”  shown at an exhibition dedicated to the Imagists by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. These pieces showed not your average environments, natural landscapes suffering cataclysmic, disaster events. Notable works from this exhibition include Tropical Storm, Midnight Tremor, and Ablaze and Ajar all developed in ’72. His paintings showed a very cartoonish, pop-art style and these works exhibit nearly the same style Waterfall (1974) describing it’s landscapes with very geometric circular hills,

strict curves of the river banks, and strong triangles of the villager tents. His works remind me of the

Visiting artist David Brame’s cartoonish style, showing unrealistic proportions and comic-styled figures and landscapes. The work Brame created in the Salisbury Downtown Gallery, showing futuristic comic-influenced characters and environment gives me a direct association to Brown’s work. At the Gallery exhibition, Brame used only two colors that contrasted heavily with one another (Pink and Black), Brown does almost the same with Waterfall, where the brown and blue hue majority allows the viewer to understand what’s most important and allows the viewer to develop the strongest interest in where the strongest color resides, such as the river in Browns work and the pink rain/oil in Brames futuristic robot work.