Hi there,
Thanks for your interest in my work!
I want to provide people with minimalist, solid sculpture. Simple art is calming.
My story is pretty different from most visual artist’s. For 15 years I made my living in the performing arts. I was a stand-up comedian for 10 years, performing over 1000 shows in 30 states. At the same time, I was a theatrical and commercial actor, usually in comedic or musical roles, including 11 commercials as a bumbling, fantasizing car salesman.
My most noteworthy role was/is in Kitty Green’s “Casting JonBenet” which has been on Netflix since it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017. A total departure from my comedic roles, this avant-garde documentary has been seen in 160 countries and won the Australian Oscar equivalent for “Best Documentary.” Netflix doesn’t release viewership numbers, but the trailer has been viewed over 5 million times on YouTube alone. My actor website is JayBenedictBrown.com.
During all this time (and the prior 15 years when I was an engineer for HP) I was always a creator. Woodworking, remodeling (I bought and spent 10 years renovating a 1919 schoolhouse, left), and in general tinkering with my hands have always been a part of my life.
In 2015 I started making wood sculptures. I hoped to become the Rothko of plywood. Seriously though, I have always wanted to see wood used as a medium for abstract expressionism. I completed about a dozen pieces but the drawings I started doing were even more minimal and could not be created out of wood. I had these free-standing designs with very fine strokes that had to bear some load. They had to be made out of metal.
So I’m a guy with no training in the visual arts. The closest I came to art school was going to the Fine Arts building at the college in Missouri where my aunt was an art major. I was five years old, but I still remember all the smells of oil paint, turpentine, and clay. My aunt was usually covered in paint (at least from a civilian’s perspective) but I was always so happy to see what she was doing.
I spent a fair bit of time in art museums as a kid, at least for someone growing up in rural Iowa. Later when I was traveling on business for HP, if I had any spare days, I was at the local art museum. I still remember sitting in the Rothko room at the Tate in London, just totally at peace, not moving for an hour.
Each piece in my Lyrical Steel series is a circular concept. They start as two dimensional drawings of what would essentially be three dimensional objects. That is, they have quite a bit of perspective included in the drawing. Then I cut them out of flat steel or bronze, which essentially takes them back to two dimensional renderings, except they are realized in three dimensions. The final result is something like a drawing on air.
I try to make pieces that are both beautiful and totally fresh. That sounds straightforward, but the concepts of beauty and uniqueness are sort of opposites. Beauty is frequently about symmetry, smooth transitions, and complementary elements, while objects that we find most immediately interesting have abnormal composition, unusual juxtapositions, and competing components. For each stroke I draw, I’m asking myself “does this look right?” and “is this too expected?” I need a “yes” and a “no” to keep that stroke.