Jonathon Brown  —  CV

Born in Edinburgh on 17th May, 1955, Jonathon moved to France in 1992; he makes his home in a hilly small village due north of Nice. 

He was educated at The Edinburgh Academy and read Moral Sciences at Pembroke College Cambridge.  At first involved in arts journalism and as occasional organiser, he now works solely as writer, artist and broadcaster.

selected recent exhibitions

(invité indicates participation in a group show; t.b.a. means ‘to be announced’)

On a Scroll, on a Roll..., Vetlanda Museum, Vetlanda, Sweden; 2007 t.b.a.

Final details of Jonathon’s début museum show in Sweden and an associated commercial show in Göteborg will be announced in the summer.

Veni, vidi, vici..., Galerie la Cadrerie, Marseille; 14th March – 6th April, 2007

Jonathon is one of three British artists chosen for their love of living in France to participate in a group show organised by the Institut de l’Entente cordiale in Marseille.

The Stations of the Cross, The Church of St Andrew’s Fulham Fields, London; Lent 2007

Later in the year a small second set of Stations will be unveiled at the Église St Michel in Duranus, the artist’s adopted village in the Alpine foothills north of Nice.

Au pinceau du soleil... (Brushing with Sunlight), Domaine Grand Cros, Carnoules, Var, France; Autumn 2006

Jonathon’s solo show at the Grand Cros followed his participation in their Celebration of Grapes, a group show in the summer of 2005, at which his hanging canvas “Noah, drunk” was first seen.

All that jazz..., Lorgues, Var, France; Spring/Summer 2005

Jonathon’s invitation show over Easter featured several large new scroll paintings, including Bryce Canyon, St Francis at San Marco and the Jazz Curtain Crucifix.

Capri Caprices, Barry Stern Gallery, Woolhara, Sydney; August/September 2004

This was Jonathon’s début show in Sydney, following his first Australian show a year before in Adelaide, and concentrated on paintings, scrolls and drawings of the journey up from the port to the gardens of San Michele on Capri.

The Scottish Riviera, Greenhill Gallery, Adelaide, South Australia; June/July 2003

RoadMovies, Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh; May/July 2002

Preparations are in hand for "RoadMovies" to travel to Nice, at the invitation of the Mayor of Nice.

Les Découverts, Centre International d'Art Contemporain, Château de Carros, France;  t.b.a.

Tjugo-tjugo, Galerie Tråman, Jönjöping & Rackargården, Kalmar, Sweden; 2001

The title means ‘20-20’ in Swedish and refers to a batch of special little canvases done for this exhibition on which Jonathon only allows himself to use paint left over on the brush from bigger work in hand.

Invité d'Honneur, Mouvement des Arts, Hyères; 15-18.ii.2002

Recent Series Paintings, The Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh; ix.2000

Jonathon’s début show at The Open Eye, though his work has appeared in group shows for some years.

Musiciens de la Mer (invité), Musée International d'Art naïf, Nice; vi/x.2000

Målningar & Skulpturer, Galerie Carl International, Torskinge, Sweden; v.2000

Ripolins, Galérie Ecuador, Nice; xi.1999

This was Jonathon’s first show of paintings entirely done using household paint (‘ripolin’).

Une petite Grande Retrospective des Années en France, Vieux Château du Bar-sur-Loup, Alpes Maritimes, France; vii. 1999

installations/décors 

Au Bonheur du Pied, shoe shop in Neuilly/Paris, 2004

Top Vacences, Occelli Immobilier; Nice, 1998

Calexico, Restaurant Mexicain; Vieux Nice, 1998

stage

Les Caprices de Marianne;  Henri Sauguet/de Musset, l'Opéra National de Bordeaux; t.b.a. 

Deux de Duras; Cambodia, 2008 ; t.b.a.

La Folie Tristan;  Opéra de la Péniche, Paris; 1996 

Jonathon’s décor was for a working by Max Charruyer of texts from Wagner, Nietzsche and Ludwig II, woven around the Tristan legend and Wagner’s music; dubbed by a critic ‘Bayreuth-sur-Seine’, it was staged in a barge on the Seine and featured Jonathon’s first ‘painted piano’; the second one was featured in RoadMovies at the Talbot Rice in 2002.

A Celebration of Humour;  Théatre des Variétés, Monte Carlo; 1995

Walton, Façade;  Nicolson, Cassandra's Death  (world première);  Royal Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh Festival; 1989

Mozart, Bastien & Bastienne; Darwin College, Cambridge;  1979

books...

RoadMovies — First Stop; The Talbot Rice Art Gallery & the University of Edinburgh; v.2002

The book for the RoadMovies show contained an extended and wide-ranging interview with Jonathon, by Herbert Glenn.

Le Destin des Lévriers; an English translation from the French of Xavier Przezdziecki ; x.2001

Puccini; Brahms; Debussy, Pavilion Books, London; Simon & Schuster, New York; 1995/96

. . . & broadcasting . . .

Well, Jonathon... — principal guest at BBC Radio Three’s Opera Box during the broadcasts of Wagner’s “Ring” Cycle, 2005-2006

Step on it... — musings on the effect of the invention of the piano pedal on the history of Western music; an interval talk during the interval of the BBC Radio Three broadcast of a piano recital from the Wigmore Hall, January, 2004

Hearing the light... — an artist's eye's appreciation of the importance of the composer’s visual instructions in Wagner's stage directions: an interval talk during the BBC Radio Three broadcast of “Tristan und Isolde” from Glyndebourne, Saturday 7th June, 2003

Shelf Life — the Potterings of a Classical Collector; Riviera Radio, at Radio Monte Carlo; a series of weekly three-hour programmes devoted to Jonathon’s record collection; 1995-1997

. . . & writing

Smoking Gun; a major profile of David Hockney at his retrospective of portraiture, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Herald, 1st April, 2006 [http://www.villaparasol.com/dhMFA/dhmfatxt.htm]

An Artist at the Opera; a series of articles for BBC Music Magazine in 2003/2004, about artists who have designed sets for opera and ballet; the magazine has run other whimsical articles including “OTT” and “OOPS” and an article about what music to play in the car...

previous writing includes: regular contributions to Times Literary Supplement, “Commentary”, 1983-92; What’s On Scotland, Arts Editor 1985-1991; Scotland on Sunday, opera & music correspondent, 1989-92; adam; International Record Review;  BBC Music Magazine; Music & Musicians &c. &c. 

Finally, Jonathon Brown is the Founder Editor of The Canard, the newsletter of the Riviera Cricket Club.

Some Words by the artist

extracted from an interview with Herbert Glenn

I remember that at Nursery School, one punishment was to be ‘sent to the corner’.  There you stood, in cramped shame, your back to the continuing class, with just the corner of the plain walls to look at.  Aged 5, I suppose, I loved it: on the grubby wall as I gazed at it, I invented landscapes mapped in the cracking tatty paint, where the river was, the railway, the post office and the coppice, whatever.  Shame and discomfort evaporated as I watched.  Often in distress, such as bereavement, people find their greatest capacity for gentility and generosity.  But I can never have expected that I would imagine Jesus noting the fact that the carpenter who hands me my cross has a work-worn broken finger-nail.

Stations of the Cross forms a project inspired by conversations with Father Martin Eastwood of the Church of St Andrew's Fulham Fields in London W14.  The Church has a set of bas-reliefs of the stations, dating from perhaps the 1920s, and Father Martin's idea has been to continue this theme in new work that may bring fresh thought to the sequence. 

Oddly it is not a sequence that has received such distinguished treatment in the art of our civilisation — as has, for instance, the full Life of Christ seen for us by Duccio or Fra Angelico or the Passion brought to us by Donatello or Bach.  In the recent century, however, thin enough in terms of religious art, one singular highlight comes with the Stations of the Cross at the Chapel designed and embellished by Matisse, in Vence, not an hour from my home.  The idea had something going for it.

We strolled and we talked. 

I was surprised but also troubled by my immediate enthusiasm for the project.  Yet I knew immediately the only way in which I could envisage this story; timidly, the day after our long and varied discussion and debate, I asked Father Martin what he thought of the idea — that the Stations be 'seen' in the pictures as if through the eyes of Jesus, rather than being presented as a sequence of views of Him.  If I achieve anything in these pictures it will be no little thanks to Father Martin's  instinctive, immediate enthusiasm for this idea, mingled as it may well have been with a sense of 'surprised but also troubled' on his part too.

Possibly my worry had been that few have the right, so to speak, to see through the eyes of another, let alone through those of one they have not met, let alone those of Jesus.  Yet the theoretical antidote to that worry came simply enough, in that if suffering is not somehow immediate, its message is diluted.  And somewhere an image of Jesus as a bearded chap over there with his timber, fixes things in a possibly unhelpful manner, both too remote and too specific, while I hope an image that places us in his perspective may unearth useful thoughts and empathy from our regimented visions as ‘third party’.

When you think about it, most pictures of something are ‘from the seer’s eyes’; of course they are.  But we don’t think about it.  We seldom notice how much of ourselves we see when we see out upon the world.  If there’s a finger across the lens we think the photograph is spoilt and we take another.  Yet Rodin’s Thinker would be seeing his fist too, however much he may also contemplate the seething awfulness of Hell below him or — as wags have it — wonder where he lost the house keys.  Much of my inspiration always comes from music and it may or may not be helpful to mention here that Wagner’s Parsifal, curiously often associated with Christian celebration of Easter, is for me one of the most telling meditations on the crisis between merely observing something and fully experiencing it.

The idea of incorporating parts of the seer’s self in an image, as it were, is not new in my work.  My so-called RoadMovie pictures of landscape seen as if on the move, in a car, often include the rear-view mirror, part of the dashboard or steering wheel, for instance, to place you more firmly as the driver.  (My love of music is a love of an art of passage and time.)  And it is familiar by implication to those who have an acquaintance with Chinese scroll painting. 

Indeed, after completing these pictures and finally deciding to keep to the supposedly monochrome medium of charcoal, I realised in retrospect how secretly important had been my memory of a Qing dynasty scroll I saw in Paris in June 2004, Pines and Thuyas in Spring, by Zhu Da (1624-1705), itself a copy of a piece by Shen Zhou done perhaps fifty years earlier.  This scroll is about 14 yards long, all in black ink and washes on paper.  Crassly called a ‘panorama’ in the catalogue, it tells of an uphill walk past some trees on a rocky outcrop, towards a shaded and restful view out to a further mountain ridge or pass; the gnarled brushstrokes tell of the trees but feet away, and stabbing strokes of the pricklesome pines in your hair.  There at the summit you too rest, to pick needles from your head and enjoy the sun through the softer leaves that reward your climb.  All in washes of gray.

These visual or technical ancestries are one thing.  Many other themes started to take on new life, however, once the idea had taken hold of me. 

For instance, I realise how distant we are from so many depictions; we aren’t really quite there.  When Jesus takes the Cross I want us to know He takes in His hands, inches from His eyes, a raw, splintery rifle-sight of railway sleepers few of us could even carry to the car, let alone uphill to our death.  The wood is against His cheek an inch or two away and I want it inches from yours.  His falls bring him to earth (as we say, meaning something similar) where there is dust and pebbles, some grass in the dirt and, to bless our fixed and tiny attention, some flowers, small, glorious, cruciform tragedies of fragility and magnificence — and some creepy-crawlies too, of course, trudging their quotidian quotas unawares, like the immortal ploughman in the Breughel painting of The Fall of Icarus... 

Then come the faces, Pilate in his exasperation, the Carpenter in his trade, His Mother's in — in agonised wonder? in some version of pride and terror?  Then Simon, Veronica, and so on.  And as I worked the pictures out in preliminary sketches I found that the more we are with Him, or as Him, in a marvellous way we are also all the more with us, as we look at the others who join Him.  By some strange chemistry, we see ourselves better in the onlookers and perpetrators than we would, I feel, in a conventional view of the chap over there with his cross.  We become unavoidable, as does the plight of Jesus.  This story is, as I started to think, a story ever more resonant in seeing, in sight, in close sight and drastic perspectives, how we see and how we are seen. 

And conceits of sight are useless, unless — we see them...

extracted from an interview with Herbert Glenn;

26th January 2007