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For me, art can be anything that my mind can dream of.

The technique for creating these woodcuts consists of a three-part process: painting, cutting and printing. The painting sometimes begins with a pre-conceived idea, while other times it is spontaneous. Usually, I render something from my environment such as flowers, trees, mountains, the moon, and the human body, or I may simply throw paint around and react to that. This allows me the freedom to create images that are personal — they relate to what is going on in my world and the world as a whole. The thoughtfulness and raw emotion that I invest in the work will, hopefully, translate into universal truths about the human condition.

The cutting is, at once, an athletic event and spiritual experience. Again, there is a back and forth dialogue between myself and the work. Some areas are translated exactly from what is painted on the board, and other areas are cut in a much more reckless manner. I believe this gives the print its vitality, energy, and life-force.

The print, the final medium, is considered throughout the process. This is where the exact colours are chosen for the print. It is also the way of capturing the event of the cutting. By using a reductive technique, meaning that the board is cut and printed several times to build up the image, I am able to play with colour and work with the different layers of mark making, once again, in an organized yet intuitive manner. I hope you, the viewer, will be able to relate to my work on several different levels, or at least be able to say, "Hey, I've been there.".

For me, my work is about:

Legacy
Faith
Perseverance
Humility
Love
Audacity
Luck
Fun

Fred Brown
The Artist

Natural Resource: High Voltage
While Kleinsasser makes you muse and meditate, Fred Brown (no relation to James) just makes you feel good. His show is titled Natural Resource: High Voltage. The joy of making is so evident. Brown bites off big chunks and surges ahead with unbelievable power. His colourful, funky, semi-abstract woodcuts are the size of the trees themselves, but he never gets lost in the woods. Brown obviously likes digging into the surfaces of his blocks, playing with hard-edge biomorphism and putting a rein on a fierce colour sense. These prints refuse to take a back seat to any painting and could be seen as the manifest destiny of the woodcuts of the German Expressionists. (They never worked that big!) And just when you get lost trying to figure out a theme, Brown reminds you that this is all fun with evocative titles such as "The Bald Soprano". Art ain't heavy, even when it comes on this strong.

-Lelde Muehlenbachs, Edmonton Bullet, 1993

Artist Fred Brown working it out in a cold S.N.A.P.
The fifth floor of the Great West Saddlery Building is not such an odd place to find Fred Brown and several other betoqued and layered print artists. That is, once you regard the gravitation of artists to warehouses as something inherently natural, and once you have watched what goes up on the freight elevator in the course of one day. ... Taking the elevator to the fifth-floor printshop of the Society of Northern Alberta Print-Artists (S.N.A.P.) recalls another cliche, the one about the starving artists. Here is a space worthy of its circumpolar designation; the shop must be about 10 degrees Celsius, and the office is even colder. ...

[The] fuchsia and leopard skin series of a print called "Ringo Starr" enframe his deliberate pace with delicate irony. Unfurled leaves of an elephant ear extend towards a bronzen patch of jungle sun scarcely imaginable this morning. In the centre, a voluptuous sculptural cocoon is intersected by a steel beam whose vibrating hotspots belie its insistent thrust. And whittled on its side, a scarab beetle -- ancient symbol of life -- scuttles towards metamorphosis. Whether an inter-gender dialogue about the rape of the environment, or a mere revel in the forest primeval, I am convulsed with laughter. Moreover, I wonder how Brown could imagine something so warm and, "...organic," I say, in this frozen place. I ask about Ringo Starr and other woodcuts.

"What they are about," he replies, "is getting back to our physical selves. We forget about enjoying simple things, like eating an apple or -- and I know this sounds cliched -- enjoying nature. The process of creating the woodblock prints is related to the meaning of the work. I begin in one of two ways, either by painting from my own clay sculptures, or I choose things from everyday life -- hands, coconuts, peppers, muscles, bananas.
"I'm always surprised when showing work that people don't realize how woodblock prints are done, because the process is so simple. It makes sense to me as a way of working because I use plywood and paper, things that are abundant in Canada.
     
"I really enjoy the physical process of making these prints, and this process relates to the content of my work. The two are interrelated. As I'm cutting into the board, I experience something that is both athletic and spiritual. After I've finished my drawings and prepared the plywood, I can't just start cutting right away. I have to get psyched up to do it.
"So, in part, this mental preparation for the choices I make and the problems solved at each step in this process are reflected in the colors I choose. The colors aren't necessarily ones that you find in the real world. I want to create a mood so that a person can experience some of the struggles I did in creating the work.

Brown hopes that showing the work in his home will help to demythologize this method of art making and make it accessible to viewers who might not ordinarily attend a gallery.
"I also want to destroy the myth that my pieces are too large to hang on their walls. When they see 15of them hanging in my little house, I think they'll get the point."

An almost palpable friction exists between aggressive forms and lyrical aspects of Brown's prints, and in this regard, he seems to be the jock of the print-making set. Planning strategies, reviewing old plays, and enmeshing himself in a process which underlines the value of struggle: Brown, an Edmonton Esk? Could be, given the intemperate conditions.
He doesn't find himself at odds with the esthetic, regarding this interplay of energy as a metaphor for life, for working through difficulties, and for resolving that most primal conflict of chaos versus order in small and meaningful ways.

"I want to create something beautiful, perhaps not in the ordinary sense of the word, but something I find beautiful that others can appreciate as well."

-Joy Sweeting, 1994