Circle Smoke and Braid

Christopher Brown

In 1989 Christopher Brown painted a large oil on linen titled “Custer in First Snow,” elements of which he repeated in this large, gestural, 28-color woodcut, printed at the Experimental Workshop in Emeryville, California the following year. As with the first, the dominant element is a golden, braided shape suggesting an abstracted figure or symbol, surrounded by hovering lantern-like orbs that lend a feel of suspension or floating to the composition. It is Brown’s ability to render the softness of the original oil in large-scale woodcut that makes this piece stand out.

According to Thomas Albright in “Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945 - 1980,” Brown’s works are “skillful adaptations of the Bay Area Figurative style of the 1950s - including its penchant for art-historical allusion - to the sensibility of the late 1970s and 1980s; they incorporate spare, broadly brushed images into a predominant concern with richly seductive, painterly surfaces in unusual harmonies of browns, greens, and blues.”

This impression was part of the Champion Corporate Art Collection (label on verso).