Roger Brown: An Interview

Roger Brown's (1941-1997) quirky, stylized paintings were influenced by such disparate sources as comic strips, hypnotic wallpaper patterns, medieval panel paintings, and early works of Magritte. His work is epitomized by a series of claustrophobic urban scenes with their drop-curtain-like gray clouds and cardboard-box apartment buildings, suggesting an amalgamation of boyish enthusiasm for model making and adult despondency. In 1996 he donated his apartment, complete with all of his belongings, artworks, writings, and automobile to the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, where it is on public display.

In this interview Brown describes his aesthetic as an "internal way of seeing external things." "Its not a totally personalized kind of vision," he notes.  "I try to deal with things that everybody sees, everybody's experience."

A historical interview originally recorded in 1977, edited in 2012 with support from the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund.