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The Arts Center at Duck Creek is pleased to present Eric Brown: The Particulars of Rapture, opening on Saturday, July 23, and on view through August 21, 2022. A reception for the artist will be held from 3-5 pm on Saturday, July 23.

When Eric Brown first exhibited what he calls his “textile” paintings just months before the pandemic, Martha Schwendener in her review in The New York Times wrote that the show “suggests painting and miracles as small, everyday occurrences: a poem written out in longhand or a scarf knitted by a beloved, if slightly barmy friend or relative. It also implies, as Klee’s paintings did, that the spiritual in art might happen at small scale, rather than in grand, orchestral gestures.”

Brown continued the series in the early months of the pandemic while quarantining in Amagansett. The paintings became his daily practice, akin to a visual diary. Central to the work is a meditative process of repeating marks. What remains on the canvas is a trace of Brown’s experience making them.

The paintings suggest textiles; yet, they are not facsimiles of woven fabric—they do not aim for verisimilitude or rely on a constructed illusion of space. In fact, Brown does not intend to make believable paintings of textiles. Instead, the physicality of the marks become the textile: they are “woven” with paint.

As paintings, they are straightforward, direct, and deliberately plain and unadorned. They embrace the imperfect calligraphy of the artist’s hand. The precariousness of the lines suggests a kind of fragility mitigated by interdependence. They are direct and unfussy—metaphors for healing, mending, resiliency, and strength.

Eric Brown (b. 1967, New York, NY) received a BA in studio art from Vassar College, and a Masters of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary. His work has been reviewed in Artnews, artcritical, Hyperallergic, The New Criterion, and The East Hampton Star. Brown was a visiting scholar and artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2015 and a recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 2016. He has had solo exhibitions at The Palmer Gallery, Vassar College; Theodore Art, NY; Crush Curatorial Chelsea, NY; Ille Arts, Amagansett, NY, and most recently at Jennifer Baahng Gallery, NY. Owner of Tibor de Nagy Gallery (1994-2017), he is currently an independent art advisor and lives between Sag Harbor and New York City.

For further information, contact Jess Frost, duck@duckcreekarts.org.