Untitled, ca. 1960
Oil on canvas
21 ¼ x 23 ½ inches
Lorna Meyer-Calas and Dennis Calas
Joan Brown's still lifes offer insight into the evolution of her interest in domestic imagery – from objects for formal study to meaningful subjects. In Untitled (ca. 1960), Brown applied her signature thick paint to items in her kitchen: a banana, a pumpkin, and a decorative jar. She experimented with texture, light, color, and scale, as well as a compositional model more structured than her abstract paintings. It was to a seemingly mundane group of still-life objects – a bowl and some eggs and cucumbers – that she turned in 1965 when she began to make the significant transition away from her signature thick layering of paint.
