ALEX BROWN
Castle, oil on canvas, 90" x 60", 2003

Born 1966. Lives and works in Des Moines, IA.

I make paintings from found photographs culled from a fairly wide cornucopia of sources; travel brochures, coffee table books, album covers, postcards, etc. Anything possessing an interesting palette and suitable subject are normally my parameters when choosing what to paint. I generally tend to stick with the more traditional subjects of landscape and portraiture painted in a contemporary or fractured manner.

Most recently, I have been employing a second image in order to define the primary image. This secondary image serves as a sort of grid system itself, but refracts the image in an interesting and more often than not, interesting way. There frequently arises a third image, a sort of conversation between the synthesis of the two formative images. I find this condition of an image resting in the limbo between abstraction and representation ultimately the driving force behind my work.