Paula Brown

Wilmington

Emerging
Visual Arts: Painting

By: Gail Obenreder

“My muse is nature. I love to see deep into the ordinary to express its extraordinary.”

Paula Brown and her brother were raised in Seattle, but as a child the painter spent weekends at the dairy farm of her Irish grandparents in Snohomish and took ferry trips with her mother to explore the San Juan Islands. A shy child, she found that “my art was my voice.” Brown was always drawing and sketching, taking visual notes in class, and painting scenery for school productions. Feeling herself both a city girl and a farm girl, everything she experienced helped her “to speak story to the world through pictures.”

Before graduating from the University of Washington, Brown was recruited by an award-winning Seattle design firm and began her substantial career as an art director / creative director in advertising, working first in her hometown and then in Boston and in Los Angeles. But she continued to paint in oils, especially when she landed in California. And she also continued to teach and exhibit in gallery shows, activities that she continues as a signature artist for the Maryland and Philadelphia Pastel Societies.

Her artistic practice (both in oils and pastels) employs underpainting techniques on surfaces that range from canvas to soft pastel papers, experimenting with texture to reveal movement in nature. Brown works to create “an impressionistic luminosity with unique marks of color and tone” that reveals “the light in nature and in people,” evident in the works that garnered her the Division’s award.

Brown moved from California to Delaware two years ago, attracted by the “natural and historic beauty reflected by nature conservancies, towns and homes, museums, waterways, and sense of community.” She’s busy “adventuring” in her adopted state, finding inspiration in the changing seasons and skies and keeping up her busy schedule of plein air oil painting, teaching pastels, and nature journaling, a practice she’s continued since her school years.

Her earliest influences were her mother (“who provided me with paper, pencils, crayons and lots of encouragement”); her fifth-grade teacher Mr. Boyd (“who told me I had a ‘star inside’ of me that made me unique and talented”); and her hero Dr. Seuss, whose books gave Brown “permission to laugh, draw purple monkeys and green giraffes OH MY!” and comforted her during a serious childhood illness.

Today, Brown continues to be inspired by many painting masters like Mary Cassatt, Andrew Wyeth, George Inness, and John Singer Sargent, with the Impressionists at the top of her list, along with painters she’s now met in Delaware.

During her childhood summers, she spent time with her German Grandparents in Iowa, where Brown “listened to my grandfather’s Sunday Beethoven and Brahms keyboard pipe organ concerts in the parlor.” It’s not surprising that she paints while listening to music – especially Bach, Beethoven, and the Moody Blues! When she’s not painting, Brown is walking in nature, traveling to experience new places and cultures, gardening, and “reading a good spy novel.” And she’s an author herself. Her book Fur Shui: An Introduction to Animal Feng Shui arose from her expertise as an animal communicator. The lifelong learner has volunteered as a nature docent in conservancies and reserves, and she’s also a teacher of the new age practice of Hawaiian Huna.

Brown’s reward is experiencing how her work impacts others, and as a “climate change refugee,” she left the California fires and mud slides to re-home in Delaware. She loves the state’s diverse culture, but the new resident is challenged by finding resources and support, so the Division’s Fellowship is especially meaningful. She plans to use the award to acquire studio space and continue expanding her practice, deeply thankful and excited “to be encouraged and recognized as a part of art excellence in Delaware.”

 

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