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| A natural artistic talent emerges By Stacy Trevenon-[ stacy@hmbreview.com ] Published/Last Modified on Wednesday, December 5, 2007 10:55 AM PST Jake Brown's life is like one of his scenic paintings: a winding path strewn with imagery, reflections or perspectives which guide the inner and outer eye. The result is an emerging artist worth noting, whose gift, like Mozart's, sprang not from training but from an innate fount in his childhood. With a simple style that has drawn comparison to artist Grandma Moses, Brown's gift continues to develop along pathways of imagination. The walls of the Half Moon Bay Coffee Company are festooned with Brown's oil paintings. Many are drawn from scenes he recalled from youth on the East Coast or from his extensive travels. There are lush green landscapes and old buildings; Brown says he "tends to go for things that appear to have a history." And there are lakes, rivers or ocean shores that show his affinity for water. "I like the way reflections work," he said. "I get to bend the reality like water bends light." The paintings also show his gift for perspective, line and directing a viewer's eye to the focal point. "That almost happens by accident," he said modestly. "I catch myself and go, 'Oh, I'm drawn to this spot.'" Still other works are abstracts that gleefully mix colors and shapes in an eye-catching melee. "It's unintentional," he said. "It's what I see and what comes out of me." Though on sale from roughly $600 to $1,250, the paintings, to Brown, represent the priceless experience of coming home. "I had spent decades leaving home," he said in his online autobiography on his Web site of www.jakebrownpaintings.com. "That indefinable something had become all to definable. It is when I paint that I feel the best about myself. It is when I fully enjoy my wife, my garden and my art. It is when little things are big like sitting on the porch with a good cup of coffee and watching the rain ... It's good to be home." His road started at age 5 in the foothills of the Berkshire mountains in Massachusetts, when he experimented with oil painting. In second grade he tried drawing; in third grade, his teacher introduced him to watercolors. Oil emerged as his favored medium. Brown's path took in many careers in many places. He left home in 1972 and headed west. When he reached the West Coast he went to sea, to work on ships. Along the way he segued into music and spent nearly 18 years as a singer/songwriter, making demo tapes of his original commercial rock, R&B, and roots rock. On land, he owned two coffee businesses in San Francisco and Berkeley, sold shoes, managed a print shop and owned a hot dog cart. He wrote a screenplay which he calls "Pulp Fiction meets Diehard meets Blue Velvet." But he always returned to art. "I was always leaving and never arriving" until he finally settled down to art. "My wife says (painting) is the only time I sit still and don't talk," he grinned. "I'm lost in another place." He does his art in one of two ways: either sitting down to a canvas with an idea in mind that he brings out, or painting from photos he took. Earlier in life, he enjoyed photography, using Tri-X film because of its high-contrast capabilities - a preference which shows up in the contrast and detail in his art today. The resulting paintings call for active, not passive viewing, whether that means visually following line and perspective to the heart of the scene, broaching a kaleidoscopic maze of abstract patterns or opening oneself to the emotional experience of a scene. "We as artists, or me as an artist, try to give you something that tells your mind, 'I know what that is,'" Brown said. "It gives you something so you fill in the blank ... At the very least, they are very, very thought-provoking." But with characteristic modesty, Brown insists his art is not meant to throw philosophical hurdles at the viewer. Rather, he says, it's to be enjoyed. "You just have to know if you like it or not," he said. |