Joan Brown: An Interview

Joan Brown was born in 1938 in San Francisco, CA. She attended the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and received her BFA in painting. Brown has long been recognized as one of the most important artists to emerge from the creative milieu of the San Francisco Bay Area of the late 1950s. She created a body of work distinguished by its breadth and personal vision. Brown’s style incorporated abstract expressionism and figurative painting. One of California's pre-eminent figurative artists, she died in October 1990, at the age of 52, in India.

“How do I know when I’ve finished a painting? It’s when that element of surprise is there. I can feel the flow start to happen just in terms of working, which is actually an altered state of consciousness,” Brown says in this interview with Kate Horsfield.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1979 and re-edited in 2004.