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These pages are in the process of being created -- check back for updates.

NOTE: These pages are best viewed on a screen larger than a cell phone in order to really see the paintings. It's important to take your time looking at these paintings, to go slowly and let your eyes and brain digest them over time. I've never been interested in making paintings that reveal themselves easily or that are about one thing. I've always loved paintings that can be discovered and then rediscovered, seeing different things each time you look at them. This website is going to be here for a long time so you can take your time, which will make a huge wonderful difference in the end.

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Joseph Browning Paintings 081
No. 081 - The Road To Picasso's Spade
Acrylic on museum board - 13-3/8 in. x 10-1/2 in.
Sunday 12/16/1990 - Private Collection




Joseph Browning Paintings 082
No. 082 - WaterClub II
Acrylic on museum board - 13 in. x 8-3/4 in.
Sunday 12/16/1990 - Private Collection

I liked having the definitiveness of the Club and Spade subjects within my otherwise abstract surroundings - both suits grounded me and gave me a sense of purpose beyond the abstract composition. And they started "talking" to me, quietly of course, and sort of thanking me for conjuring them up and bringing them to life. Around this time any consideration I may have had about the other two red suits disappeared from my mind. The Clubs and Spades that I conjured up had nothing to do with the other two suits, and they were quite clear about that in their talks with me. Nothing malicious or judgmental mind you, just quietly secure in the new roles they played at the tips of my brushes.




Joseph Browning Paintings 083
No. 083 - Artist In Studio Grows Like Flowers
Acrylic on museum board - 10-3/8 in. x 13-1/4 in.
Wednesday 1/9/1991 - Collection of the Artist




Joseph Browning Paintings 084
No. 084 - Day Music (1 of 5)
Acrylic on museum board - 16-1/8 in. x 11-5/8 in.
Wednesday 1/23/1991 - Collection of the Artist

Day Music begins a small series of five paintings that all utilized the same basic composition of painted letters with a reflection. Again, like the Club and Spade Series, this kind of repetition of subject matter was a relief of sorts and a joy to create. I was less concerned with developing complex pictures and happy just to paint something more simple and straightforward. And as all my friends know, I absolutely love listening to music when I paint or work or create. These paintings, while continuing my random use of words as subject matter, emerged as obvious tokens of the musical joy I was receiving while painting them.




Joseph Browning Paintings 085
No. 085 - Sometimes Bob Is Love
Acrylic on museum board - 12-3/8 in. x 10-3/16 in.
Thursday 1/24/1991 - Collection of the Artist

The title and perhaps the painting itself Sometimes Bob Is Love can be interpreted a couple of ways: first it is a play on "and Bob's your uncle," a British saying meaning "and there it is" or "and there you have it." Secondly, around this time there was a popular television series airing called "Twin Peaks" that was being very much enjoyed by me, Olga and our friends. It featured a mysterious character named Bob who wreaked a special kind of evil havoc on some of the other characters in the series. Bob, in this case, was not someone or something you wanted to be associated with, hence the contradictory title of this painting. Which now that I think about it may only make sense to me.




Joseph Browning Paintings 086
No. 086 - Bridge Home Sights
Acrylic on museum board with glass - 10-1/2 in. x 21 in.
Thursday 1/24/1991 - Private Collection

My high school friend's father who bought this loved the subject as he knew exactly where I derived the image from and also was intimately familiar with the same dusk cloudscape as depicted. When I said the final composition would include a broken piece of window glass, as if from a car windshield, he immediately attributed this idea to my near death encounter with the Loma Prieta earthquake as written about herein regarding Painting No. 039 Post-Earthquake Freeway Driving Home While Bella Courts Dali With Smiles. And that attribution really sold him on the painting. While I was happy that I had made another sale and to a man whom I greatly admired, I was also quite aware of the fact that this particular painting was really a departure from the various styles of work I had previously done. And I immediately understood that this buyer appreciated this more direct and obvious subject matter more than my complex abstracted surrealism creations. And this fact made me smile because of it's pure truth: sometimes less is more and sometimes simple and clear is received better than complex and abstract.




Joseph Browning Paintings 087
No. 087 - The First Step
Acrylic on museum board - 12-1/4 in. x 5 in.
Friday 1/25/1991 - Collection of the Artist




Joseph Browning Paintings 088
No. 088 - Future Homes
Acrylic on museum board - 12-1/4 in. x 5 in.
Friday 1/25/91 - Collection of the Artist




Joseph Browning Paintings 089
No. 089 - Just One Alternative To Aggression
Acrylic on museum board - 11 in. x 14 in.
Saturday 1/26/1991 - Private Collection




Joseph Browning Paintings 090
No. 090 - Will You Still Be Mine?
Acrylic on museum board - 16 in. x 11-5/8 in.
Thursday 2/14/91 - Private Collection




Joseph Browning


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