Joan BrownAn Introspective Journey

painting of a well dressed couple with the woman leading a man down a street while the man holds a shopping bag with the townscape in the background
Joan Brown, The Journey #1, 1976. Oil enamel on canvas, 84 x 72 inches. San José Museum of Art. Gift of Norman Lariviere, 1993.13. Photo by Douglas Sandberg.

In the 1960s and 70s, Joan Brown’s paintings became increasingly autobiographical, with self-portraiture the primary process for introspection and self-definition.1 Depicting her role as a mother, an artist, a woman, and a lover, she documented intimate moments of her life, as in the beginning of a love affair abroad in The Journey #1(1976), which she produced after spending the summer of 1976 traveling in Europe. As she explained: “I strongly feel the need to put this introspection in the form of pictures, I then become the ‘student’ and consciously ‘study’ the content of the pictures I’ve painted. . . . Looking in the mirror, becoming a spectator, literally describing myself, is a very graphic way of being introspective.”2

  1. Karen Tsujimoto, “Painting as a Visual Diary: The Art of Joan Brown,” in The Art of Joan Brown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 17. ↩︎

  2. Joan Brown, in Karen Tsujimoto, “Painting as a Visual Diary: The Art of Joan Brown,” in The Art of Joan Brown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 18. ↩︎