By Joel Lang
Keeping up with Janine Brown means keeping busy. Since the beginning of the year the artist who lives in Fairfield and has a studio in Bridgeport’s AmFab building has had work in juried shows at the Rowayton Art Center, the Ridgefield Guild of Artists and the Silvermine Art Center. The thing is, none of it looks the same.
Some of her newest work, a pair of 2019 abstract paintings from a series she calls Pattern Play, were in the Ridgefield members show that ran online most of April. Each canvas is populated with dozens of shapes, some open, some solid, that appear to have been laid out for consideration, like letters imagined for a new alphabet. Both Ridgefield paintings are done in the same color code of repeated greens, blues and yellows.
Completely different are Brown’s “Social Distortions” portraits. Her artist’s statement says they are a commentary on the masks people wear on social media. Maybe so, but Brown’s vivid portraits are too extreme for any Facebook profile.
“Lady Luck,” one of two portraits in the Rowayton “Spring” exhibit currently online, shows a young woman whose skin is mottled gray, except around the eyes, where it is white. She wears oversized ornaments. A gold headband befitting of Wonder Woman looks borrowed from a giant’s wristwatch. Her earrings are dancers in feathered skirts.
Not really, says Brown. The earrings are actually hanging lamps lifted from an interior design magazine. So is most everything else, including the woman’s eyes. Brown bases her portraits on commercially photographed models (some are by Keyvan Behpour, an AmFab neighbor), then begins the transformative process of disguise.
“I collage magazine pieces on top of the original image. I cut out eyes, I find some that fit. I’m making (the portrait) by putting things on top of it,” she says.
Brown, who once worked in the fashion industry, may know what she’s added, but Lady Luck’s eyes tease a viewer into searching for the real person behind the kabukilike mask. Two more portraits, “Diamond Diva” and “Dame Hilton” appeared in this year’s Silvermine new members show. Enigmatic and regal, both hold bejeweled