Waterfall 1974

Roger Brown’s ‘Waterfall’ looks to me like it was made with acrylic on canvas, with the artist making repeated marks to create bands of luscious colour. I can imagine Brown working on this, teasing out the hard edges of the hills against the flat cool stream. What was he thinking as he painted those cute round bushes? And those jaggedy mountain peaks? I can picture him wrestling with the illusion of depth against the painting's surface, in the same way that I wrestle when I am trying to make paintings myself. The paint is applied in thin layers which gives a glossy sheen, and there are all these tiny details like the little house and figures in a boat. Brown must have wanted to create a world within a world here. Brown was part of an artistic community in Chicago, he probably knew Christina Ramberg and Ed Paschke. Like them, he had a knack for taking ordinary scenes and imbuing them with a weird sense of theatricality. They were all in conversation, borrowing and riffing off each other. Painting can be like that, an extended back-and-forth between artists, until something surprising appears on the canvas!