Ray Brown Paintings Featured in CVMC Lobby

Ray Brown paintings featured in CVMC Lobby through April 6.

“It is a real pleasure to have Ray Brown’s work hanging in Central Vermont Medical Center’s lobby gallery,” said Judy Tartaglia, CVMC president and CEO.  “Ray is well known as a  painter of the Vermont landscape and also as owner of the Drawing Board. We are happy to provide this venue for such a well-known member of our community.”

Ray Brown shares his unique story in his artist statement opening the exhibit:
 “My paintings are responses to places I have been. I have been in Vermont for roughly 30 years. I have painted what I have seen and felt about Vermont. In 2007, I had a stroke. I then spent about a year learning to walk and speak. With the support of my wife, Jody, and my son, Dylan, I was pretty successful. I had to figure out how to paint again. Not painting was simply not an option. I had lost the use of my dominant right arm. If I was going to paint, it had to be with my left arm and hand. As it turns out, it was a blessing in disguise. My paintings in the last few years prior to the stroke had become very tight. I think the paintings were good, but it was not much fun.”

“Then Jody and I went to Italy. I saw a new landscape and found a new vocabulary.
My new work is what I have on exhibit at CVMC. I am painting with big brushes and a broader palette. I mix a color and put it where I want it. Each painting has a relationship with a real place, and I am trying to use color relationships to explore that place and time. I have found a way to work that is challenging and very rewarding.”

The landscapes in From Vermont to Italy are a jumping-off point for the kind of painterly concerns more commonly associated with abstract art. Ray Brown’s art inhabits a middle ground, between pure abstraction and narrative realism. An accomplished painter of the Vermont landscape, Ray meets the challenge well in interpreting the Italian landscape. His palette is right-on.

Brown was trained at the Massachusetts College of Art, the Haystack Mountain School, Boston University, MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and the Cranbrook Institute. He has exhibited throughout the country, including the National Gallery, the Addison Gallery, the San Antonio Museum, and locally at the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe, and Didben Gallery in Johnson, among other sites. He lives and paints in East Montpelier with his wife Jody Wilson Brown.

Ray Brown’s From Vermont to Italy will be on exhibit at CVMC through April 6, 2012.

For more information about CVMC visit www.cvmc.org or follow them on Facebook or Twitter. For more information on the artist visit raybrownartist.com