While there are many artists who dabble with traditional icon painting and a host of others who follow the path of minimalist abstraction, there are very few who combine both traditions of art-making in their practice and do this at a very high professional level.
Leonard Brown in studio. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Queensland
For Leonard Brown, these are two parallel streams in his art – he is a trained icon-painter, who employs traditional materials, prayer and meditation techniques to create icons adhering to the conventions of the Holy Russian Orthodox Church, whilst working in a contemporary idiom of abstraction. Although he has painted icons and exhibited his abstractions for decades – this is his 45th solo exhibition – only in recent years has he started to exhibit icons and his abstract paintings in the same exhibition emphasising the fact that these are two sides of the same artistic quest.
Leonard Brown, Saints John (The Evangelist) and Prochurus—In Exile On The Isle Of Patmos, 2016, Egg tempera, 24kt gold leaf and gesso on beech wood panel, 91 x 61cm. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Queensland
In Byzantine and Russian Orthodox theology, the icon is a visual parable, or a pathway, which leads from the terrestrial to the celestial sphere and that a beholder who contemplates or prays through an icon, spiritually transcends from the earthly to the heavenly realm in which dwell the spiritual beings depicted on the icon. The Russian revolutionary avant-garde early in the 20th century, particularly Kazimir Malevich and the Suprematists, sought to create new icons for the new age and many of them, having initially practiced in the iconic tradition, attempted to translate the spiritual values of icon-painting into a new non-figurative iconography.
Brown has continued to work in parallel traditions, icons with conventions going back to the earliest centuries of Christianity, and revolutionary abstraction where forms were forged in the opening decades of the 20th century. He states that he is a “minimalist painter” and that on “many levels, my icon painting practice relates strongly to my contemporary painting practice”.
Keonard Brown, Mother of God (Vladimirskaya), 2013, Egg tempera, 24kt gold leaf and gesso on beech wood panel, 61 x 46cm. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Queensland
The icons in this exhibition are all painted on seasoned wooden panels that have been covered in gesso and have been painted with pigments mixed with egg tempera. Many of the backgrounds are covered with 24kt gold leaf which has been beautifully gilded and brought to an ethereal glimmering surface. Like most icon-painters, Brown follows ancient prototypes as models and, for those unfamiliar with tradition and convention, the imagery may appear as copied from earlier exemplars. It is more accurate to say that the iconography has been faithfully observed, but the images have been spiritually reinterpreted. Icons by definition are functional liturgical objects that the faithful access as windows into the divine: they spiritually feed the worshipper, while at the same time enlightening them. Images of the inspired St John the Evangelist sitting in a cave on Patmos and, while inspired by God, dictating the Book of Revelations to his disciple Prochorus, or John the Baptist bearing witness to the coming of Christ, or the supreme image of love, the Mother of God of Vladimir, are some of the exceptional icons in this exhibition.
Leonard Brown, Snow on the Peaks, Snow in the Valley—Meteora, 2016, oil on linen, 60 x 60cm. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Queensland
The abstract paintings are oil on canvas and are only modestly larger than the icons (the largest icon measures 91 x 61cm, while the largest abstract painting is 120 x 120cm), and they continue within this meditative, transcendental tradition and invite the viewer to enter into them and dissolve into the new created world. The artist’s titles are frequently indicative of a starting point in the creative process – Snow on the peaks, snow in the valley (2016) – Meteora, Sailing East (2016), Trisagion – three times Holy (2015), Sunset in the Grand Canyon (2015) – but they are not a description of forms to be sought and deciphered in the paintings. Malevich was once to declare that Suprematism is “the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves meaningless, the significant thing is feeling.” When asked why he included specific names of objects in his titles, Malevich responded that it was to indicate that real objects lay as his point of departure to make abstract spiritual images. There is a parallel in Brown’s titles: they reveal departure points and sources of inspiration, not descriptors of the contents of the paintings.
Leonard Brown, Finding Myself Inside, I Looked Out, 2015, oil on linen, 90 x 90cm. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Queensland
There is a wonderful sense of boundless freedom in Brown’s abstractions, a celebration and a spiritual yearning. Although the physical scale of the canvases is modest, the energy is very concentrated and focused and there is a hypnotic power. My experience of his paintings, both the icons and the abstractions, is like being bathed in a spiritual radiance.
Sasha Grishin works internationally as an art historian, art critic and curator.
Andrew Baker Art Dealer
7 June to 8 July, 2017
Queensland
