Raymond Brown

May 12, 1933 - Nov. 20, 2024

RAYMOND BRUCE BROWN 1933 - 2024 Born in 1933 in San Antonio, Texas, Raymond Bruce Brown’s first brush with infamy as an artist was when he painted the neighbor’s dog as a young boy. In fact, throughout his life everything was a canvas: an orange, a plate, a threadbare carpet. His extraordinary talent and drive to make art had him still sketching in the margins of the NYTimes the day before his death at 91.5 years. There was nothing slow about the pace of his walk or the depth of his knowledge of art and critical theory, especially at exhibitions across Paris where he had taken a second home. His love of wine, and his astonishing cellar, had to keep up with the dinners he sought that were so good as to literally bring tears to his eyes. He had a passion for radical politics that belied what seemed like a disconnected countenance. He loved animals of all kinds, for years feeding a trove of wild cats at his farmhouse in Bourgogne and he had no problems with his daughter’s pet rodents or spiders in the rafters. God forbid anyone would cut his trees!! After his vitiligo turned him into a near albino, he cut as striking a figure as Andy Warhol. He kept a human skull on the family bookshelf, he passionately watched ballet, had regular opera nights with friends, and fastidiously tracked large organ concerts at cathedrals. He skipped graduations and weddings but loved Christmas like a child and was particularly pleased with a present he had bought for himself one year: a Freud action figure doll. The speed and erratic nature of his driving was legendary. Ray’s father, Oswell Raymond Brown, was born in I.T. - Indian Territory - later renamed the state of Oklahoma. His mother, Opal Mae (nee Blagg), was born in the small town of El Naranjo, Mexico where her family had moved at the turn of the century to try their hand at raising sugarcane. Both their families spent sizable portions of their time in Texas, in both San Antonio, where Ray was born, and Houston, where the family victory garden led to Ray’s lifelong detestation of okra. By the time he was a teenager the family had moved to Los Angeles and Ray spent countless hours riding the late forties Red Car electric trolley around L.A. on the hunt for book shops and comic bookstores with his best friend who had only recently been released from one of the Japanese American concentration camps. When they graduated from high school, the two decided to take a math class at Santa Monica College and on a trip to the nearby beach, his best friend was caught in a rip tide and drowned. This would later inform one of Ray’s large “split-screen” paintings. Ray’s father was an athlete and businessman, but Ray dreamed of making a career as a comic book artist. His creative ambitions shifted when, after two years at Long Beach Community College, he enrolled in the art department at the University of California Los Angeles where he met his great friends and mentors, John Paul Jones, Gordon Nunes, Sam Amato, Jan Stussy, William Brice and Annita Delano. On a summer break in San Antonio to see his mother, he took a summer school Spanish class, and it was there that he met his future wife, Mary Helen (Maria Elena) de la Peña. He returned to Los Angeles to complete an MA at UCLA (no MFA was yet offered), but drove back on multiple occasions to San Antonio to court Mary Helen. His work also started to gain notice: he won two high profile awards during the same festival both as a student AND professional artist. After UCLA, his approach to his art began to evolve significantly. He wrote, “Since the mid 1950's, my work has been a visual psychoanalytic autobiography. No other person, to my knowledge, has made such a visual, rather than written, analysis. Surrealists, for instance, used dreams but did not follow through with visual analysis. Because my work has this unique aspect, I believe it has long-term value. Psychoanalytic theory is, of course, very important in contemporary art criticism.” Ray and Mary Helen were married in 1956 in San Antonio while he was completing his mandatory military duty at Fort Sam Houston, during which served as medical assistant. They had their first daughter, Maria Dante Brown, in 1957. As soon as his military service was completed in Texas, Ray and Mary Helen moved back to Los Angeles. They both sought out teaching work, but their pay was meager. Ray worked at a factory in El Segundo while Mary Helen got her teaching credential, and they were so poor that a wooden fruit carton served as a cradle for their second child, Stephen Ray Brown, born in 1959. Their fortunes changed shortly after their only son was born, with the generous help of artist Lee Chesney, who helped Ray get hired by the University of Illinois, Champagne Urbana. Ray taught for three years and they had their third child, Therese Elena “Tita” Brown, in 1962. They moved again with a young baby in tow, this time back to Los Angeles to join John Paul Jones to help establish printmaking as a discipline at UCLA, where Ray would continue to work through the rest of his career. In 1963, they had their final child, Anna Maria “Nonny” Brown de la Peña. These were productive years for Ray. His work was collected by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Brooklyn Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institute, the Library of Congress, the Hammer Museum and others. His work was also shown globally, including France, Italy, Germany, Yugoslavia, and Mexico. He was also a member of the CeeJe gallery. In a 2024 restrospective about Ceeje, curator Michael Duncan describes Ceeje as “the dream-child of Cecil Hedrick and Jerry Jerome, a gay couple who in 1962 fell into the gallery business through interest in a group of young UCLA graduates… Known for its inclusiveness, Ceeje represented artists from a variety of ethnicities and backgrounds. Unlike the largely homogenous lineup of LA-based gallery Ferus, the Ceeje roster included artists across the gender spectrum who were variously Mexican American, Armenian American, African American, Italian American, Asian American and gay.” Of Ray specifically, Duncan said, “Ray Brown taught painting and printmaking at UCLA for over thirty years. Like other faculty members, he was brought into Ceeje gallery on the recommendations of former students. Brown’s 1963 Ceeje exhibition featured intaglio and aquatint prints presenting two contrasting or complementary images in a ‘split screen’ format. For his 1964 Ceeje exhibition, Brown created boxes out of folded prints made so that different images appear on their four sides and top. The sides of Falling Box (1966) depict a stumbling man and woman, a vase in the act of falling and raindrops. Brown’s interest in Freudian psychology emerged in Father and Son (1968), perhaps the artist’s most direct artwork. In this mythic depiction conjuring his feelings about his dominating father, Brown presented a searing assessment of patriarchal aggression.” Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight would single out Father and Son in his review of the retrospective: “Some individual works hold unusual interest. Ray Brown’s ‘Father and Son’ is a blistering image of parental brutality, the whip-wielding man’s muscular nakedness like a grim Roman Hercules and the glowing red body of the battered young boy, who grasps a shrieking rooster, electrified by a vivid blue contour-line.” In 1975, Ray took the helm as chair of the UCLA art department and helped build one of the most important art schools in the nation, which included visiting and permanent faculty like David Hockney and Richard Diebenkorn. One of the longest running art department chairs, he finally stepped down in 1986 and retired soon after but he left a legacy of hiring many successful artists such as Chris Burden and Charles Ray. In a telling episode, he rallied the famously divided faculty to unanimously sign a letter demanding that the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel cease immediately due to what he saw as clumsy craftsmen destroying the true genius of Michelangelo. Throughout these same years, Ray and Mary Helen’s home became a gathering place for aesthetes and artists. Experimentation was front and center, and with Mary Helen acting as guardian angel and chef extraordinaire, the ambiance was always welcoming, especially for any eccentric outsider. Artists like Charles Garabedian, Elliot Elgart, and Arthur Levine and their families were often at their home. In the 1970s, Ray also became the leader of the West Los Angeles chapter of Les Amis du Vin and his camaraderie with other oenophiles led to regular, boisterous wine tastings and to the construction of a wine cellar. Then, just a few years after leaving his position as chair, Ray decided to retire. Ray bought a farmhouse in Bourgogne, France that had already been renovated with a studio (once again with a tip from artist Lee Chesney.) Surrounded by Burgundian vineyards, Ray began to split his time equally between Los Angeles and France––and between French and Californian wines. His haunts became thrift stores and art exhibitions and the best meals he could find. Once the artists’ cooperative First Independent Gallery (FIG) was established in Santa Monica, Ray had several solo exhibitions and group shows. This productive outburst included thickly layered abstract work, careful hand painting on top of computer-generated imagery, and black and white stark figurative pieces exploring positive and negative space. Ray finally slowed but never stopped making art. Even when, at age 89, he moved into assisted living in Santa Monica he kept creating, including some extraordinary oil pastels. At age 91.5 he went in for heart surgery and sedated by the best drugs in the world, he slipped away. He leaves behind Mary Helen; his four children, Dante, Steve, Tita, and Nonny; his six grandchildren, Angelina Smith, Siena Leslie, Gabriela Leslie, Opal Lambert, and Rafael Lambert; two son-in-laws Michael R. Leslie and Kevin Lambert; and one last cat in Bourgogne.