Carol Rose Brown

Carol Rose Brown has been through several metamorphoses as an artist. She started showing while still in her twenties and working at an office job in the Brooklyn Museum. One of her first exhibitions, at the adventurous Sidney Janis Gallery in the mid-1960s, was a light show about Marilyn Monroe. That led to commercial projects, including a window for F.A.O. Schwartz, the huge toy store on Fifth Avenue. “But I have trouble working with a lot of people, and those projects were becoming bigger and bigger,” she recalls. “I said, This isn’t really what I want to be doing as an artist. I don’t want to be a factory.”

Her husband, Dean Brown, was a photographer for Time/Life Books whose work entailed frequent travel. Brown cut back on her studio practice to be with him and turned to animal and landscape sketches. On an assignment in New Hampshire in 1973, Dean fell off a mountain and died. “I went into a pit,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do. I kept my place in New York and went out west as much as I could. I just rented a car and drove around, and little by little I started drawing again, making hundreds of little landscape drawings.” The artist donated the archive of Dean Brown’s work to the Center of Creative Photography in Tucson and based herself there.

By the mid-1980s, Brown began doing enormous drawings and paintings of bears, both ferocious and benign. “I have loved bears since I was four and saw my first grizzly cub very close up in Yellowstone,” she says. “Much later I had the great good fortune to be able to spend some time in Alaska, where I had the unforgettable experience of seeing those magnificent animals in places where humans had not yet intruded.” Those paintings led to shows in Tucson, Santa Fe, and New York and a $20,000 award from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

In 1993, Brown was in a serious car accident, after which she made her largest pieces by grouping together many smaller segments. A year later, she remarried, a doctor named Howard Schwartz, and moved to Santa Fe. A friend convinced her to take classes in photography and printing, an exercise she hoped would help her learn to conserve her first husband’s work. Instead it led to a whole different body of imagery.

“I started out by trying to make landscapes with little people out of clay to have something to photograph,” she says. “At the time, I told myself, I’m just going to take some clay and smoosh it around and see what happens if I let my hands do whatever they want to do. I let my fingers and my mind and my eyes click together without me telling them what to do.”

The “performance pieces” and photographs she has been making for the last seven years incorporate the clay pieces she makes and the dolls and doll parts found on eBay, together with fabrics and figurines, all engaged in quiet, spooky dramas, perhaps moments of tenderness between mothers and children. In her photography, the characters emerge like the half-forgotten figures from dreams. Their closest relatives in the annals of modern art are the fantastical imaginings of Joseph Cornell, whose magical boxes also exist in a world outside the realm of daytime logic and reason.

If there is a consistency to Brown’s work, it is in an almost childlike wonder toward the subjects she chooses—whether bears or landscape or dolls—but she says a deeper psychological impetus is also part of the process. “Though art, I’ve been able to express the hellish parts of my life. And also my deep reverence for all of life.”

Ann Landi

Carol Rose Brown lives and works in Santa Fe, NM. More about her work can be found at carolrosebrown.com.