Kevin Brown

Japanese Maple, Strybing Arboretum, Oil Painting

2019

Artist Comments
Slender, sinuous branches of a Japanese maple in the foreground with an old dogwood in the background. Delicate afternoon light. Strybing Arboretum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Painted in the studio from heavily processed photos that Kevin displayed on a monitor. He alternated between digital camera images and scanned negatives from a film camera. The piece began with a slightly violet gray underpainting and was built up in several optically interactive layers; Kevin waited for each layer to dry before the next was applied.

About the Artist
Kevin R. Brown focuses on intimate details of the landscape accentuated by the golden hour. Drawing on his background as a Director of Photography for feature films, he first uses his camera to set the stage for his luminous paintings. He shoots landscape photos that he then heavily edits before painting the scene in his studio. Kevin grew up in Sacramento and Lodi, California, and says he began drawing almost before he could write. For years, Kevin limited his art to pastel portraits in one to three colors on toned paper, as he was born with mild red/green colorblindness. One day, a recipient of his portraiture challenged him to research a way around this limitation. Kevin says,”He asked, ‘If you could paint, what kind of painting would you like to do?’ I pointed to a calendar I'd seen earlier out of the corner of my eye and said, like that! It was a painting by George Inness.” Kevin threw himself into studying the color wheel, color harmonies and design, ultimately formulating a way to create his glowing landscape paintings. Today, Kevin paints from a small home studio near the beach in San Francisco. He spends his free time hiking, shooting video and building software music synthesizers.

Words that describe this painting: trees, park, nature, San Francisco, California, Golden Gate Park, nature, classical, representational, oil painting, green

Japanese Maple, Strybing Arboretum
Kevin Brown
Oil painting on wood
Varnished and Ready to frame
One-of-a-kind
Signed on front
2019
9 in. h x 12 in. w x .15 in. d
0 lbs. 9 oz.