Jeffrey Brown – Artist of the Week

I’ve raved about JEFFREY BROWN on this site many times before as he is one of my all time favorite artist/writers…and I thought he was a great counterpoint this week for Artist of the Week to last week’s pick of JAMES JEAN. 

Brown and Jean really could not be more different, and yet their works are singularly powerful, emotional, and beautiful.  As a fan of clean lines and beautifully organized postive and negative spaces that artists such as JAMES JEAN and ADRIAN TOMINE and even ADAM HUGHES so excel at, I would never have thought years ago, before I discovered JEFFREY BROWN that I could fall in love with such a messy, sketchy, non-precise style.  But from the first pages of Brown’s UNLIKELY, I was absolutely in love.  I think the secret for me in what works in Brown’s style is the combination of story and art…the art on its own is easy to dismiss if you aren’t drawn to his style naturally, but combined with his poignant stories about love and loss and all the dimensions inbetween, it’s impossible not to appreciate the rawness of his style.  In simple black and white lines (and with not a ruler in sight) JEFFREY BROWN conveys more emotion in a single panel than most artist can manage in an entire book.  It’s a beautiful sight to behold, and I just never get sick of it. 

Discovering JEFFREY BROWN was one of those transformative moments for me as an artist, as a writer, as a reader, and even just as a person.  My whole world opened up to something I hadn’t even known existed.  It’s an amazing thing to just go to the comic book store one day and have an entire world open up to you in the pages of a simple book…it’s the kind of moment that doesn’t just come around every day and so when it does, you really must treasure it… 

2 comments

  1. theyetiinside’s avatar

    I loved Unlikely. Read it in a single day….mostly while I was offstage during one of my shows. The storytelling is excellent. Can’t say that I love the art, but I think it accomplishes the goal of telling the story. I don’t want to suppose anything about his work, not knowing a lot about it, but I also think he likes his style messy and imperfect as it mirrors life more than the fantasy of perfectly executed lines and styles.

  2. 1979semifinalist’s avatar

    Yay! I’m so glad you liked it. I forgot I had given it to you. It’s great right? I just feel like he’s so honest and raw and bare that you can’t help but relate and be moved. You know how neat I like things (art included) so it always shocks me that I like Jeffrey’s loose messy style, but I do, I just love it.

Comments are now closed.