Because the light of our daily life shines down on us every day, we sometimes forget how lively and beautiful it can be. Alice Dalton Brown, Where the Light Breathes, an exhibition at My Art Museum on the works of Alice Dalton Brown, gives us the time needed to focus on the light and scenery in our everyday lives that we might otherwise pass over. Brown, a realist painter who rose to prominence in 1970s Soho galleries, is well regarded not only in the US but among art collectors in Korea as well. This exhibition is the largest retrospective of Brown’s works ever to be held outside the US and features some 80 works representing her entire life as an artist as well as three new works commissioned especially by the organizers. 

Brown’s artwork has changed to reflect a new environment whenever she’s moved to a new home depending on her opportunities or situation. The artist’s story of having gotten her start with inspiration from the shadows formed from the clouds and sunlight of Ithaca, New York where she spent her teenage years will naturally come to mind when viewing the shadows visible on the children’s toy blocks and through the farms on the outskirts of town that fill her early work. The artist’s style developed to inject the passage of time and a deepened sense of space into the otherwise stationary canvas by reflecting the way shadows change over time, even if they belong to the same subject resting in the same place. The different sections of the exhibition hall, arranged by subject matter and color, provide a closer look at the changes in the artist’s works as well as her interests.

The works in her House series reflect the interest in residential buildings that Brown explored until the late 1990s. While earlier her focus had been on capturing the outdoors exclusively, here she portrays adjoining spaces connecting the outside to the inside, such as the front doors, gates and windows of a house. Brown fixed upon the one house as her subject and painted it in several different ways over the course of many years, capturing time and the way the light changed in that one place in each work. Afterward, Brown moved on from allowing what was in her field of vision to define her works and instead worked at creating new places which don’t actually exist by combining elements of various places as best matched her vision, leading to works with a more diverse assortment of locations. Her study of light and shadows that she had exhibited from the beginning of her career was a major help in this process. With her effective use of light, the artist brings out a contrast between manufactured houses and organic nature to create a diverse array of landscapes. The myriad plant life and their realistic shadows on the canvas, meanwhile, produce an immersive feeling where even the space around those browsing the works feels as though it too were a part of the landscapes. This capitalization on the extension of time and space leads to Brown’s well known Summer Breeze series from the 2000s.

The works in Summer Breeze enter the indoors entirely and depict open windows with curtains billowing about in the wind. Of particular note are three new works created specifically for this exhibition: In the Quiet Moment, Expectation and Lifting Light. The large paintings are displayed alongside their rough drafts, giving viewers an opportunity to examine the way the artist’s techniques lead to more realistic paintings as she works as well as the process involved in creating the final products. The rooms, painted without any objects in them, are connected to the walls of the exhibition hall in a way that gives an expanded sense of space, while the curtains appear to flit in the breeze at that very moment, calling attention to the realism of the pieces. In Brown’s works the calmingly colored outdoor scenery both emphasizes the motif of bodies of water, like lakes and oceans, and creates peaceful, beautiful landscapes that, while invented, could conceivably exist in real life.

People these days have to put up with many aspects of daily life that they never had to in the past. Even though we’re living in the present, in many cases we miss our lives from before. That nostalgia with which many people have been looking back on the freedoms of their earlier lives gives them a fresh perspective on the unique light and liveliness that exist in the trivial parts of everyday life. With that, Brown’s canvases lead us to a happy place in our imaginations, as though we’re staring into a vivid getaway—even though we’re still indoors, looking at art like a movie that’s somewhere between the everyday and the extraordinary.

TRIVIA

Soho

A fashionable neighborhood in New York City and whose name is shortened from “South of Houston Street.” While the area was filled with factories and warehouses in the past, artists moved in after the Great Depression and set up galleries and ateliers, after which the area became famous for its art scene. As rents have risen, however, numerous luxury brands have entered the neighborhood as well.