Clint Brown is professor emeritus of art at Oregon State University, where he taught for thirty-three years. His work has spanned a variety of media and been shown in galleries, museums, and other venues in the U.S. and U.K. He is the author of Drawing from Life, a college drawing textbook, and Artist to Artist: Inspiration and Advice from Artists Past and Present.
Artist to Artist
This book brings together more than a thousand quotations from artists on fifty-seven subjects ranging from creativity to solitude, technique to talent.
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Mark of Distinction: The Prehistoric Invention that Propelled Us Into the Modern World.
The line has in itself neither matter nor substance and may rather be called an imaginary idea than a real object. Leonardo da Vinci wrote this brief statement in one of his notebooks. It provided the impetus for writing this book, along with another observation from the artist Rico LeBrun:
True lines do not exist in nature; we invent them. They are poetic fiction.
Of all the tools in an artist’s toolbox, the line is the most elementary. It is also the most contrived because lines, as LeBrun noted, do not exist in nature. We use lines in drawing to define shapes, but in fact there are no outlines at the edges of objects. I began to notice how often we use lines to represent an idea. I had a growing feeling there was something profound about a line as an imaginary idea. This, I felt, had a much broader significance far beyond its use in art.
Clint Brown: Drawings
This collection represents five decades of exploring the human figure through drawings. Clint Brown uses the nude as both a formal compositional device and as an expressive metaphor to reveal aspects of the human condition.
From the introduction: “Drawing is something I’ve done for as long as I can remember. My report cards from kindergarten and first grade begin mentioning my enthusiasm for art, which the teachers wanted to encourage. However, soon the tune changed, and the teachers were suggesting that I needed to spend more time on my reading and arithmetic and less time drawing—which was true.”
Clint Brown: Mixed Media
This is primarily a picture book, with images of work created over a lifetime. There is still work to be created, but this represents a large part of work done up to this point. These are both three-dimensional and two-dimensional works of art as well as some that blend 3D and 2D elements.
The images are presented more or less chronologically, following the sequence in which they were created. The choice of media, the occasional switch back and forth between two and three dimensions, or a shift in emphasis sometimes came about in response to other artists’ works or current events.
This book complements the artist’s previous collection, Clint Brown: Drawings (Jackson Creek Press, 2015).
