Christine Brown: Spectrum of Creativity

Details

Stella’s, 5 Main St, Lyme, NH 03768

August 25 – October 31, 2023

Special thank you to Matt Brown Fine Art Gallery for sponsoring this exhibit

About the Exhibit

Christine Brown “Grinny” is my grandmother. While we were putting this show together—summer 2023—she spent most of her time digging a ditch. I’d find her in muck boots up to her knees, shovel in hand, digging.

When you ask her why, at 91 years old, she had decided to start digging a ditch, she would laugh and float her hand up to loosely point out the spot where the trickle of water first caught her eye and she’d decided to dig a path for it to travel.

For me—and I imagine also for my sister and cousins—there are very few memories from childhood that don’t involve this pond, or ducks, or Grinny’s hand floating up to point out something that caught her eye, causing her entire face to light up and sparkle. 

The same spark of curiosity is in her artwork too. It is particularly visible in her woodcut prints. It is almost as if her essence is speaking through each one. Her approach is simply to let something catch her eye, spark her creativity and then, after she’s gotten it onto the page, her attention moves on to something else, something new. This means her works are in various levels of completion, but the energy of each one is palpable. And their varying states of completeness make them that much more interesting to gaze at. They left me wondering often: what was going on at that moment? 

I asked her this question frequently as we were putting together the show. She’d just laugh and say she couldn’t remember. Often it would spark another memory or story, usually about protests against the Vietnam War, sometimes about nuclear proliferation. For my grandmother, art isn’t this elevated thing that only belongs in fine art museums. It’s about capturing the life that catches your eye while you are in the act of everyday living. And so that’s what we tried to share: a slice of the everyday things that spark my grandmother’s full spectrum of creativity. 

 

Robin Spencer

Granddaughter of Christine Brown

August 25, 2023

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About Christine Brown

Born in Poole, England in 1932, Christine Brown spent her early years in England, Chicago, and Washington, DC. Her architect father encouraged her early passion for art and design by sharing his pencils, papers, and compasses for Christine to create interesting patterns. 

Before her freshman year at Radcliffe College she worked at Seventeen magazine where she observed the people in the art department had the most interesting job. At college she directed her energy to design, one of just three women studying architecture in her class. 

Four months after she college graduation, she got married. While her husband studied for graduate school, she took night art classes at the Boston museum school. She also attended classes at the Corcoran School in Washington, D.C. and at the London School for Arts and Crafts. 

For Christine, art and politics have always been inter-woven. While selling woodcut prints through galleries, she was lobbying for Women Strike for Peace and an end of the Vietnam War. She remembers walking around Washington with prints under one arm and briefing papers under the other.

Sometime in the ‘60s she saw a duck decoy that interested her so much she started carving them. Sixty years later she continues to carve wood, mostly ducks and other birds. Also in the ‘60s, her family (son, Matthew Brown, and daughter, Jennifer Brown) started to come up to Lyme, NH. In the 1980s, she moved to Lyme full time and has been here ever since. 

Today, at 91, she works mostly in oils and watercolors. And of course, she’s still carving ducks.