Biography

Biography

I was born in Cornwall, Ontario and moved to Halifax twenty-six years ago. I have lived, as well, in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick.

I hold a BFA and an MA in Art Education from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. I studied painting with Art MacKay at the Regina College Art School and Kenneth Noland at the Emma Lake Workshop, Saskatchewan, and watercolour painting with Kay Stanfield, Marie Koehler-Vandergraaf and Jeannie Edmonds-Hancock in Nova Scotia. Earlier, I studied Advertising Illustration and Typography at the Ontario College of Art, receiving the Associateship (AOCA) of the College.

I worked first as a typographer and designer for the Ryerson Press in Toronto, The University of Chicago Press in Chicago, and free-lance in Regina, Saskatchewan, and Fredericton, New Brunswick. I have been active in the art-scene in Halifax, writing reviews for Arts Atlantic and Visual Arts News, presenting workshops and seminars, and working in art galleries and museums. I have been painting full-time since 1996.

In 1988, after painting in acrylics for many years, I discovered the fun and challenge of watercolour painting. Searching for subject matter, I began to paint the skies, water and weather. Now, my paintings emerge from the experience of sailing the coastal and offshore waters of Atlantic Canada for nearly thirty years. I have done much of the navigation on voyages as far afield as Boston and Newfoundland, and this experience is central to much of my work.

My Paintings express the land, sky and water from a sailor's viewpoint. The paintings of coastal views emerge from the experience of examining a seascape with the navigator's eye to confirm a position by the configuration of the coastline. Other paintings are interpretations of the newer electronic navigation systems. Still others arise out of storms at sea or passages along the coast.

Exhibitions

• 1999 Notions from the Oceans, Nova Scotia Centre for Craft and Design, Halifax. (Invitational)
• 1998 Far and Wide, VANS Biennial Juried Exhibition. Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia Yarmouth Branch, and University College of Cape Breton Gallery. (Group)
• 1997 From the Sea, ARTsPLACE, Annapolis Royal, NS. (Solo)
• 1996 Far and Wide, VANS Biennial Juried Exhibition. Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and University College of Cape Breton Gallery. (Group)
• 1995 From the Sea, Maritime Museum of the Atlantic. (Solo)
• Passages, Dalhousie Art Gallery (Solo)
• The Evening Nudes, Art Alliance Gallery, Halifax. (Group)
• 1994 Far and Wide, Visual Arts Nova Scotia (VANS) Biennial Juried Exhibition. Dartmouth Heritage Museum. (Group)
• 1991, 1990, 1989 Nightshift, Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax. (Group)
• 1990 Garden Party, Eye Level Gallery, Halifax. (Group)
• 1984 Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax. (Group)
• 1983 and 1975 Mount Saint Vincent Art Gallery, Halifax. (Group)

Collections

Public Collections: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Art Bank. Three purchases, 1994, 1998 and 1999.

Private Collections: in Halifax, Dartmouth and Glen Haven, Nova Scotia; Fredericton, New Brunswick; Ottawa, Toronto, Burlington, Guelph, and Gormley, Ontario; Edmonton and Calgary, Alberta; Great Britain, Sweden, Germany, Bermuda, and the United States.

Commissions

• 1999 & 1998 Private Collectors, Halifax and Great Britain
• 1997 Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, Private Collectors in Halifax and Bermuda
• 1996 Private Collector, Edmonton, Alberta
• 1995 423 Helicopter Squadron, Shearwater, NS, Private Collector, Saint Margaret's Bay, NS.

Professional Memberships

• Canadian Artists Representation (CARFAC), Visual Arts Nova Scotia
• Associate, Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour

July 25, 2000

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From the Sea

The following is an essay written for a catalogue which accompanied an exhibition of watercolours by Kathy Brown held at ARTsPLACE, Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia from June 29 - August 10, 1997. It has been reproduced with the kind permission of the author, Kay Stanfield.

From the Sea: works in watercolour by Kathy Brown

Kathy Brown's exhibition, From the Sea, has developed over the past seven years. Several of the paintings were included in a solo exhibition, Passages, at Dalhousie University Art Gallery in the summer of 1995. The paintings featured here are diary-like segments of her personal landscape memories, layered with carefully copied details of charted course fragments, specific log entries and tracings of coastlines. These come from her adventures as navigator aboard the family sailboat, Equilibrium. With family and friends she has sailed around the coast of Nova Scotia, into the Bras d'Or Lakes and to the shores of Newfoundland - which voyages have provided her with a rich source of information for her art making.

Kathy has been involved in art making "forever," she says. Fortunate to have had an art-enriched childhood, she continued her studies as an adult at the Ontario College of Art, and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, attended an invitational workshop at Emma Lake, Saskatchewan, worked as a book designer for a number of years, and taught children's art classes.

Wedged between gainful employment and the demands of a growing family, Kathy has always made time to pursue a search for her own way of painting. So it was no accident that led her to try watercolour in the late 80s when I met her in an advanced watercolour class as part of the Nova Scotia College of Art and design's Continuing Education program. Watercolour was "a fit," she says. The how and why of a body of work is never completely understood, but this one "all began with WEATHER." Here is an artist finding herself with time to create, discovering an exciting compatibility with a medium and plumbing her own personal experiences for subject matter that is rich beyond expectation.

Two familiar and long established traditions become partners in these paintings, one from the art world and the other from the world of sea goers. Landscape is the most popular subject matter and/or catalyst for Canadian Artists. Combine this with the familiarity and fascination most Maritimers have with the sea and the result is a body of work that is accessible on many levels. When the two elements are layered, something else not so familiar happens: the main focus of interest becomes the less tangible subject matter, what is left out, what is inferred. The contrast of navigational order layered on top of an engulfing ocean in Force 8 leaves the viewer pondering that which is "between the idea and the reality" (T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men). What about the bone chilling salty wet, the physical pounding of the boat and the crew, the sea sickness? Are those skills of navigation, those fragile lines of a charted course enough defence against the storms of nature? The terse words copied from the log distill the emotion from the situation but it is visually there, so very understated, in the break of the plotted course line. Force 8 anchors this exhibition with its questions of order, of control, of our relationship with natural forces.

Kathy Brown does not talk about metaphors or life voyages. Indeed her enthusiasm is for the specifics of navigation, for course setting and fixes, for the careful and accurate tracings of the coastlines from the various charts using a custom made waxed paper. There is no transgression into invention when it comes to the plotted courses of trips, but neither is there a beginning or an end. You the viewer are at sea in the middle of a journey without the comfort of a safe harbour or quiet anchorage. This work is about continuing day by day and dealing with situations as they happen, trusting the skills and order inherent in mathematical precision. Invention happens in order to give material reality to the otherwise intangible grid of Loran radio waves. This superimposed grid of nylon line and/or thread also acts as a design element. In Loran 5930 the coloured lines indicate the Loran lines as they were meant to be, however when a transmission tower fell down that navigational method was impossible. The transparent lines are the ones Brown had to use. Nothing is left to chance but is carefully crafted to translate the narrative as it was. The rigour in her art making comes not from theories but from lived experiences.

Brown's effort to keep her course tracings historically accurate anchors her narrative. Her love of detail and historical fact is translated clearly in the work Whistle Buoy - a lament for the inevitable passing of a navigational system based on buoys, charts and lighthouses. On one level these paintings celebrate a system now being taken over by satellites and Global Positioning Systems (GPS). Charts, or rather parts of the charts she and the crew have relied on to help them find their way in fog, rain, storms and unknown waters are now part of her paintings as collage materials. While retaining their original meaning they also become the headland in Loran 5930, a wall in Rain at Times Heavy and a pathway in Navigating the Easter Shore. The coastal contours are transformed into cloud cove in Silver Light Great Bras d'Or, a composite memory painting with strong value contrasts accentuating the land.

As much as Brown disowns any overt emotional content, it is interesting to know that she has a dread of fog. And her oft repeated outlines of the coastline are very much like the contour edge of land that is the last thing you see before the fog completely closes down all visibility. Kathy Brown's courage and faith in going forward are shared with each of us.

Kay Stanfield
Halifax
June, 1997

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