William A. Brown

William A. Brown left graduate school in psychology to become a photographer in the 1970s. He received a MFA from the University of Florida in 1972. He went on to become a founder of the Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta and the studio program at Emory University where he taught for over 40 years. His work merges conventions from photography, film, sculpture, and painting. Mr. Brown has an extensive international and national showing history primarily in video. His current project, Paintings for a Robot, uses digital techniques to generate montage images that are rendered by robotic painting devices.   

This brave new world of machine fine art painting signals a new singularity between photography, digital image manipulation, and oil painting. Distinctions between these seemingly unique media will collapse Mr. Brown believes. Mr. Brown is well aware that creating images that challenge the massive commercial enterprise that painting has become is possibly a fool’s errand. Successful dealers, artists, and collectors have ascended to a sort of Valhalla of self-importance and avarice that won’t easily be made obsolete by the pioneers of machine-based painting. There is a charging at windmills aspect to this work, but Mr. Brown believes in the imperative of a more efficient painting methodology based on the new robotics.