I have been painting for the last 4 years after a break of about 10 years working with photography and digital manipulation.

My practice now is exclusively portraits clothed and naked. Since returning to painting, inspired particularly by Lucian Freud the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2012 and more recently the Goya at the National Gallery. My paintings are constructed in a manner that the painters of the 17th and 18th centuries would recognize.

The clothed series of Women,is inspired by the Goya portrait of the Duchess of Alba in a black dress. The women in my series all wear one of two outfits acquired from local charity shops and adopt an approximation of the Duchesses pose. The series is open ended and perhaps draws parallels with the modern selfie culture of staged portraiture given the paintings are constructed from photographs and the sitters engage the camera and therefore the audience directly. The flat grey background places the sitters out of the everyday time frame.

The naked series also employs dressing up but they have only a garland of flowers on their heads as a reference to staged photography and classical painting and similarly in a neutral grey space.

Ian Brown, 2016

I have for many years been preoccupied with work concerning the figure in the landscape.

This stemmed from a love of Giorgione’s the Tempest. The mysterious enigmatic quality of this painting struck a deep cord in my mind and has stayed with me undiminished over the years. I also have great admiration for the bather paintings of Cezanne and the single figures of Courbet. When I discovered photography I was drawn to the series of figures on the beach made by Bill Brandt. They seemed to have a similar quality to the paintings I admired. In my career as an artist I have at different times tried to make works about the figure and landscape through painting and combinations of painting and photography with the emphasis of body or landscape shifting in importance between the two elements.

In the late 1990’s a change of studio led to a reintroduction of photography into my work, these bulky collaged pieces prompted me to consider other ways of making the work. I decided that the digital revolution in photography could perhaps give me the platform I required to make these hybrid spaces. The two strands of work I have included in the presentation are on the one hand to make still images describing the visual sensation of travelling through the landscape. For these images I have taken a systems process for arriving at the image. I take a series of photographs whilst moving through the landscape with a camera on my chest or fixed in the car taking a picture every predetermined number of steps. The images are then processed in the same order in the computer to make a single image of the walk or drive.

The figure and landscape series are made in parallel; I have no predetermined system for putting together the figure and the landscape except that I set up an interaction between the figure and the surface of the landscape in which they are placed. There are subtle influences from painting and photography through out the work.

Ian Brown, 2004