Mel Brown – B’reishis 74

Description

Mel Brown is a self-taught painter, entrepreneur, and a possible occasional mystic descended from an Eastern European rabbis family that originally came from Spain. He grew up in a working-class steel town in Northwest, Indiana.

In his early years, he worked as a railroad switchman as well as a boiler cleaner at U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana. He also studied abstract experimental photography at Indiana University under the tutelage of Henry Holmes Smith, one of the most influential fine art photography teachers of the mid-20th century.

Mel went on to study medicine at both Indiana University Medical School and the University of Palermo in Italy before setting out on a decade-long travel and discovery journey. During that period, he lived with Native Americans on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico, fished with local fisherman in Sicily, tended apple orchards on an Israeli kibbutz, was a pathologist’s assistant in the San Francisco Bay Area, taught sociology at Indiana University and was an aspiring cartoonist in New York City.

After his years of travel, he founded what is today a multi-million dollar children’s product company, Crocodile Creek, that now has a presence in more than 50 countries around the world. He continues to serve as Creative Director of Crocodile Creek as well as Co-CEO along with his brother.

For many years he has also been a dedicated teacher of Jewish mystical texts. In addition to leading intimate study groups in a line-by-line parsing of the Torah, he co-leads a post-denominational Jewish spiritual community in the Boston area.

Mel is engaged in creating non-representational art that is unique and evocative, drawing on his own wide-ranging experiences, sense of mystery, and ongoing engagement with ancient Jewish texts.

For the past 20 years, he has been living with his family in the Boston area.

Artist Statement

THE GOAL OF KNOWLEDGE IS NOT KNOWING

The Baal Shem Tov

I paint from the inside out, oftentimes starting on a journey without knowing the destination. For me, art is more than a visual expression; it is a process of meditation and listening. I paint with acrylics and ink on canvas and use a very simple palette.

For most of my life, I’ve had a sense that at the boundaries of what we know is a certain mystery that calls out to us. We may sense it at times, but we neither can fully know it nor can we definitely name it. When I stand before a canvas and paint, I often try to tap into that mystery.

I hope my paintings can be seen as both universal and particular, that they can be seen as simple pieces of beauty, mysterious yet also holding within them meanings that can resonate in different ways with different viewers and listeners.

I often embark on a visual conversation with the ancient Torah text’s ideas, exploring such themes as the creation of order out of chaos, the creation of light, and the idea that the world as we know it was shaped by language. My work is also often informed by the fact that the Hebrew language came into being at the time of transition from pictographic to phonetic writing and the idea that each of the Hebrew letters most likely holds an essential symbolic meaning, meanings that perhaps we no longer fully know.