photos by dkellyphotography.com

 

 

Margaret Zox Brown grew up in Manhattan with summers at her family’s 18th century barn house on the eastern end of Long Island. Both environments are richly embedded in her being, affecting all her artwork for the past 23 years.

 

Having a natural & innate propensity for art, Margaret inevitably gravitated towards it. She drew her entire life finding her subject matter in the faces of friends and relatives or the corners of her home practicing and perfecting the rendering of whatever she saw. Then when she was in her late 20’s she decided to treat herself to what seemed almost exotic; oil painting lessons. She immediately discovered color and art buyers immediately discovered her as an expressive, passionate colorist.

At first, while naive and new to painting, in order to be “painterly” Margaret distorted the images she painted. Although she was actually exploring color her subject matter was definitely rough and distorted.

 

She painted like this, in this naïve style, for about 10 years until a teacher from the advanced oil painting class that she had been taking at the time and still takes today, 23 years later, encouraged her to go back to her drawings, refine them and keep her images genuine. Margaret soon realized that the more defined her images were, the freer she was able to be with her backgrounds. She realized that the fundamental aspect of art, drawing, was essential to the open ended freedom of expression she seemed to be bursting to explore with her art.

 

It also was becoming apparent that formal structure and refinement in all things was what Margaret needed to express herself with complete freedom. Studying art history through her advanced oil painting class and books on art as well as regular museum and gallery visits was satiating her soul. Her grammar and high school education at the elite Chapin School in New York presented her with a formality of culture that became ingrained in her; became truly a part of her. And her college, Trinity College in Hartford, CT with its excellence in education, its caliber in the world of small liberal arts colleges, its genuine beauty as an architecturally exquisite campus with pristine landscaping and the presence of history everywhere – all of that became a part of her, deep down.

 

 

“I carry these things with me as I paint every single painting from beginning to end. I carry these things with me as I draw each drawing seeking the line or the gesture or the shape or the mood that will inspire me to do a painting.”

 

So it seems that for Margaret Zox Brown all that is her education from grammar school through college along with all that is the study of different movements in Art History is the structure from which all her artwork stems.  “And, having “that structure” in my back pocket and always knowing that it’s there has allowed me to be free to express myself through different series in my art.”

 

With the shift to attention on her actual drawings, Margaret started painting paintings of a solitary object in an abstract background. She did this for quite some time with her figures becoming more and more refined while her backgrounds were becoming more abstract. Then after a very snowy Winter in New York and so a beautiful, overflowing Spring that followed, Margaret was moved by all the trees she was noticing everywhere. She painted these trees in the same way she had been painting the solitary objects, “feeling at first that the expression of these trees was going to be limitless. They were very exciting to me. They were organic; each one was different from another. They reached up. They bowed down and so on.” But in exploring these trees, Margaret tried something she had never done before; she abstracted them. She started to take away what she had originally put down and then add to it over and over until she had successfully arrived at the expression of the emotion behind it all.

It seemed then that her life truly changed. She thought and lived as she painted. She started to let the world happen and guided it gently and creatively rather than trying to control it all. And, she was willing to let things go that she fiercely held onto before, even if she thought she needed them because now she knew that the big picture was possible to work even better with all new things in it. And, it was at this point that she really felt, “there is no turning back. I could only be an artist from here on in.” Her work and her life had completely come together.

 

Margaret painted abstract trees and landscapes for a while always trying to create depth, distance and even a sense of longing. But eventually feeling as if she had succeeded in working through her expression of the essence of trees and landscapes, Margaret then thought if she could abstract trees and create distance why couldn’t she attempt to abstract something on a much flatter plane, like a still life?

So, Margaret then started painting abstract still life paintings. Her first of these paintings were complicated pieces with an abundance of color and differing perspectives, like in Cubism. She then kept on going creating these abstract still life paintings but eventually simplified them by eliminating all the varying perspectives and reducing the expression of color to the object’s essence.

 

The 1st series she painted in this simpler form of an abstract still life were “Tools.” The inherent nature of or even the emotion associated with the subject matter was what she seemed to be concentrating on, with color, as always, her true subject.

 

Then after she painted “Paper Bag with Lemons” which was her last “Tool” painting she shifted and went from painting Tools to Fruit. In her first few Fruit paintings, Margaret kept in the tool as in “Spooning Berries” and “Nutcracker” but then focused solely on the luscious, ripe, organic roundness inherent in fruit. And with all her fruit paintings, Margaret was able to work through this series completely and thoroughly creating paintings that truly satisfied her urge to express all that fruit was for her.

 

So, what would be next? Margaret was at a point where she had to think of what would be even more round, more luscious, more sensuous, and deeper than fruit and the expression of fruit. She realized then that the perfect candidate to explore with all this new knowledge was the Human Form.

So the Human Form became her next and now current series. The Human Form is a subject matter Margaret first experimented with many, many years ago when she first started painting. She painted individual people in her early, naïve style. And, she painted individual people as a solitary object in an abstract background. Now, though, she is coming to it with all the knowledge and experience of having gone so much past those early periods. She is coming to it having created paintings that successfully hover between Abstraction and Representation. She is coming to it having studied so much Art History. And, she is coming to it having arrived at a place of genuine appreciation for the elements in her life’s journey that are her backbone, her “structure.” And it is all of these things that give Margaret Zox Brown the freedom and confidence to express herself with the emotionally stimulating and thought provoking color journeys that signify her art.