Stephen Brown

Stephen Brown has been dubbed a painterly realist for his simultaneous concern with the faithful representation of the natural world and the physicality of paint. In his oil portraiture, still lifes, and landscapes, Brown worked the surfaces, building them up, paring them down, and leaving gestural marks visible. His unpopulated landscapes, for which Brown drew influence from George Inness and Edward Hopper, among others, depict the Colorado flatlands of his youth. Light—both naturalistic and an invocation of the imagination and the sublime—permeates Brown’s work, imbuing the mundane with an element of transcendence.