One of California's most well-known and celebrated figurative expressionist painters, Joan Brown is recognized among the important artists who emerged from the creative milieu of the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1950s.  Perhaps because of her premature death, recognition of her work as a significant abstract painter of the late 20th century has taken time.

San Francisco born Joan Brown became an art student almost by accident.  She graduated from high school at 17 with no real training in art in 1955.  Her parents enrolled her at Lone Mountain College, then a women's Catholic school in San Francisco.  Shortly before her first day of classes there, Joan on an impulse visited the campus of the California School of Fine Arts, (now called the San Francisco Art Institute), located on Russian Hill near her home, having seen an ad in a newspaper.  She began classes there the following the morning, and went on to receive her BFA from CSFA in 1959, and her MFA in 1960.

Influenced by a diversity of artistic groups including the German Expressionists, the French Impressionists, and the works of Western European old masters, Brown's quick, cartoony drawing style was noted for its radically thick, and later radically thin, paint.  Many of the images and ideas in her works were inspired by personal life and by her extensive travels.  She married four times.  Three of her husbands were artists: William ‘Bill’ H. Brown, whose name she kept, Manuel Neri, and Gordon Cook.  Her fourth husband, Michael Hebel, a lawyer and police officer, shared her spiritual interests and love of travel.  In her later career, she made frequent visits to India and became a devotee of spiritual leader, Sathya Sai Baba.  Brown died tragically in an accident in Puttaparthi, India, while installing an obelisk she had created for a new Eternal Heritage Museum at his ashram.

Born Joan Vivien Beatty, she had a father, John William Beatty, who was a second generation Irishman who worked for the Bank of America.  Growing up fluent in Spanish, Joan learned the language from her mother, Vivien Beck, who had been born to a Mexican mother and Danish father in Watsonville.  Joan's mother suffered from epilepsy and ultimately committed suicide when Joan was in her mid thirties.  Joan was an only child and described her family life as 'dark and crazy', and ‘I couldn’t wait to get out of there.’ (Tsujimoto).

Brown’s early education was in Catholic schools, first at St. Vincent de Paul and then at Presentation High, but she rebelled against the strictures of both the religion and the schooling. One of her escapes was to swim in the freezing waters of the San Francisco Bay at Aquatic Park.  She also loved to visit the public library and read about the ancient cultures of Greece, Rome and Egypt.  Sometimes she made sketches from magazines of Hollywood stars, such as Betty Grable, and it was her portfolio of these drawings, on typing paper, that she submitted to the California School of Fine Arts and was admitted.

At seventeen, her first year at the CSFA she found uninspiring, but in 1956 Elmer Bischoff came to teach, and he became perhaps the most important influence on her career.  “He was the first serious, committed person I ever met in my life.”  Brown has said. (Albright)  Her early work was affected by the heavy impasto and thick-skinned paint surfaces of Bischoff and Frank Lobdell, but she was drawn to her own subject matter, such as shoes, dogs, and other subjects that she repeated again and again.  De Kooning and Picasso were also strong influences on her work.  “I respond to Picasso”, she said (Albright, 59) “because he wasn't worried about 'style' as a definition of his ego.  He didn't need to be an 'abstract painter' or a 'still-life painter'...he did whatever he pleased, setting his own rules and breaking them just as soon as he made them.”  Her background in Abstract Expressionism, with its emphasis on subjectivity and interior investigation, underlies her approach to figuration.

The subjects in her art are simple forms, busts, full figures in the manner of David Park, as well as animals frequently rendered with fantasy and whimsy.  Images were almost sculpted from massive globs of paint colors, at times to a thickness of four or five inches, often set against areas of chocolate brown.  Brown’s work was inspired by Abstract Expressionism, but her subjects displayed her passions, whether her private life and pets, her passion for dancing and swimming, and fascination with ancient cultures and spirituality.
 
In the late 1950s she was married to painter William ‘Bill’ Henry Brown (1931-1980), who had been born in Oakland, California.  William Brown worked in the Bay-Area Figurative style in the late 1950s while they were married.  Joan and Bill Brown were married only a few years but remained friends until her death.  In the 1960s, he adopted a more precise, hard-edged style and later left for England, where he died in Bristol in 1980.
 
Joan Brown was married to sculptor Manuel Neri (1930- ) between 1962 and 1966, and the two were active in the Six Gallery in San Francisco, where shows at times consisted of little more than the opening night party.  While living with Neri (1959 to 1966), Brown was neighbor and friend to artists Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, Wallace Berman, Jess, George Herms, and Joan and Bruce Conner, with most of whom she showed at San Francisco's artist-run galleries: Spatza, Six and Batman.  New York enthusiasm for Bay Area Figurative painting resulted in Brown's first solo show there, at the Staempfli Gallery in 1960.  Brown's youth at the time (she was 22 and still a student), her talent, and the unusual fact that she was a woman brought her a sudden celebrity.  In 1962 she received Mademoiselle magazine's award for Outstanding Single Achievement in Art.  Later more exhibits followed at Staempfli and at the David Stuart Gallery in Los Angeles.

Brown had a son with Manuel Neri, Noel Elmer Neri (1962- ), her only child, who was born in August of 1962.  Noel’s birth, perhaps the most important event in Brown’s life, compelled the previously independent artist to move her studio into her home.  Noel Neri is an attorney and a sculptor who has been active in the Philadelphia area.

Although sometimes erratic, her early work displayed humor and primitive intensity. Her subject matter was more personal and specific.  By 1965, not satisfied with her art, she withdrew from exhibiting for a year to revise her form and distill her use of color.  Her later paintings evolved from her roots in Bay Area Figurative into an idiosyncratic expressionism.  Her work became more intimately linked to her world of personal experience, blurring fact, fantasy, and memory.
 
In 1968 she married artist Gordon Cook, (1927-1985) who was active in the Bay-Area art scene.  During their time together, Brown and Cook shared a passion for dancing and distance swimming in the San Francisco Bay.  Brown continued to paint prolifically, including lively, often mysterious images of lovers, dancers and swimmers.  The marriage lasted a decade. Brown's paintings from the years of her marriage to Cook are disciplined and spare, as were Cook's own small canvases.  Big-band dance music was an inspiration for her in the early 70s, resulting in a series that is perhaps her most memorable.  Figures were often black silhouettes against orange backgrounds.  Brown and Cook were divorced, and she then traveled in Europe with a new boyfriend, creating a group of paintings.

For a brief time she lived in the Sacramento Delta country, where she painted fish and introduced Oriental motifs into her work, inspired by the Chinese colony that flourished in that area at one time.  She also painted her young son, Noah, and later a series in the mid-1970s that reflected her involvement with a San Francisco swim club.

Swimming for Brown was an exercise in self-discipline and self-control that brought her face-to-face with her own physical limitations.  Although small and slight, she swam long distance races in San Francisco Bay.  Her swimming coach, Charlie Sava, was an important mentor, as was her friend Modesto Lanzone, a Dolphin Club member who rowed beside her during her swims and helped her overcome her fears.  Brown also traveled in Italy with Lanzone.  In 1975, she nearly drowned while participating in a group swim from Alcatraz Island to the San Francisco shorefront.  The resulting series of remarkable paintings, After the Alcatraz Swim (1975-76), chronicles Brown's attempts to comprehend her brush with death.

Perhaps as a result of this experience, in the late 1970s Brown embarked on a wide-ranging spiritual quest.  Images from ancient Egyptian religion, Hinduism and Theosophy began to show up in her paintings.  Her mid-1970s work moved away from the Abstract Expressionism (heavy impasto, spatters) and turned to more exotic themes, such as Egypt, or imagined views of Tibet and China.  Some of her more notable works were inspired by places and people she knew intimately, creating a sense of familiarity mixed with strangeness and the absurd.
 
Brown became influential again in New York during the 1970s, and exhibited regularly in galleries there.  This paralleled the emergence on the East Coast of 'New Image' painting, which her early works had anticipated.  In 1974 she also began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.  In 1986 she received an honorary Ph.D. from the San Francisco Art Institute.

In keeping with her desire for spiritual community, Joan Brown began attending meetings in 1979 at Ananda Community House in San Francisco, an offshoot of the Self-Realization Fellowship in Southern California.  There she met lawyer and police officer Michael Hebel, and the two were married a year later.   Her wedding to Hebel in 1980 was a Hindu ceremony at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art attended by artists, art world denizens, police officers and lawyers, -people from both of their worlds.  Hebel moved into Brown's house in San Francisco, which she had previously shared with her son and Gordon Cook.
 
Her subject matter during the last decade of her life dealt increasingly with her spiritual beliefs and devotion to an Indian guru, Sathya Sai Baba, whom she and Hebel first encountered during their honeymoon in India.  In the last eight years of her life, Brown constructed 11 tiled, outdoor obelisks featuring images of animals and nature.  Modeled after Egyptian obelisks, these large-scale public works, some over 40 feet high, portrayed symbols from a wide assortment of cultures and religions, Brown’s hope being to reach  a broad audience with a kind of all-purpose spiritual message.

Her son, Noel Neri, became a father in the mid-1980s, and Brown's tender portrait of her grandson fuses the personal and spiritual. Portrait of Oliver Neri (1988) depicts her toddler grandson holding a lotus flower and adorned with necklaces bearing the yin-yang symbol and a portrait of Sai Baba.

In 1990, Joan Brown and Noel Neri left California to install one of her obelisks in the new Eternal Heritage Museum at Sai Baba's ashram in India. The project was delayed, and Noel left after some weeks to return to California.  Shortly thereafter, an improperly anchored turret in the museum fell, killing Brown and her assistants, Lynn Mainric and Michael Oliver, and destroying the obelisk.

Joan Brown created a body of work distinguished by its breadth and personal vision, even though her creative output was cut short by her premature death.

Sources:
Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945-1980
website of the Oakland Museum, California;
Karen Tsujimoto, The Art of Joan Brown
website of the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts
website of Minnesota Museum of American Art
San Jose Museum of Art website
Michael Duncan, "The Self and Its Symbols"Art in America
Abby Wasserman,  ‘Into the Light: the Transformation of Joan Brown’, from Museum of California Magazine
David Carlson Gallery

Selected One-Person Exhibitions: Six Gallery (1957); The Cellar Foyer, San Francisco; (1958), Batman Gallery, San Francisco (1959, 1961). Spatsa Gallery, San Francisco (1959); Staempli Gallery, New York (1960, 1961, 1964); Primus-Stuart Gallery, Los Angeles (1961, 1962); San Francisco Museum of Art (1971); San Francisco Art Institute (1973); Charles Campbell Gallery, San Francisco (1974, 1975); University Art Museum, Berkeley (1974); Allan Frumkin Gallery, New York (1974, 1976, 1979, 1981, 1982); Joan Brown Retrospective, The Oakland Museum and University Art Museum, September 1998 thru January 1999.

Selected Group Exhibitions: 77th Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1958; 82nd Annual Painting Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Institute at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1963; The Oakland Museum, California. A Period of Exploration: San Francisco 1945-1950; 1973; San Francisco Museum of Art, Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era 1976; Bay Area Figurative Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hirschorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1990.