Mark Brown’s Published Books
By Mark Brown
90 pages, published 6/9/2021
This book is a small retrospective of my artworks from 1957 to the present, including stacks of bricks, small model sailboats, skateboards, sculptures, photographs, paintings, etchings, photo etchings, screen prints, stained glass and digital artworks. These images are some of my favorites from a lifetime of art making.In the arts the way forward is seldom a clear path. Inspiration comes from many sources, most often from creating and…
By Mark Brown
90 pages, published 5/18/2021
Coasting is a book of photographs taken at the edges of things. The edges of continents, islands, lakes, rivers, forests, meadows, sky and land, cities, towns, maps have always fascinated me. I like edges, places where one thing becomes another - transition zones, boundaries and borderlands. I like the mixing that happens, the juxtapositions, the collisions and connections. The photos in this book are examples of edges meeting and morphing into…
By Mark Brown
88 pages, published 4/7/2021
This book features photos I took over a one year period, while taking daily walks around my neighborhood during the Covid pandemic in 2020 and 2021. These walks heightened my appreciation of the small, beautiful, unusual and unforeseen details of daily life and the cycles of time and seasons.As real travel was impossible, I tried to mentally live as a traveler, while of necessity staying close to home. Most of these images were captured while…
By Mark Brown
38 pages, published 4/12/2021
LeafLines is a book of digital art works featuring leaves used to create dynamic negative and positive space made by the visual interplay of the color, texture and shape of individual leaves against solid background colors. The images are calligraphic and have a visual vibrancy and intensity created by the figure/ground relationship of the leaves with the background spaces. They were created by scanning or photographing individual leaves and…
By Mark Brown
90 pages, published 1/24/2021
This book is a collection of photographic images that I made using Kodachrome positive transparency slide film, my medium of choice in the pre-digital era. I took thousands of slides in those years and the images in this book are my favorites from that vast archive.Also included are the stories behind the images. I curated 150 color slides from that collection and had them scanned to create the book. It is divided into five sections: Nature and…
By Mark Brown
90 pages, published 11/5/2020
These poems, writings, songs and pictures are a small look into the last several decades of some of my life as an artist, writer and musician, consisting of poems, nature writings and songs. Some of these poems were written 30 years ago and many were written and reworked in the last several weeks. The songs were all written in the last 7 years.Inspiration is always a mystery. You never know if it will be roses or rust - You never know which…
By Mark Brown
60 pages, published 8/8/2020
This volume is a collection of the best forgotten art from my personal archives that I found while organizing my studio, garage and basement during the Covid Crisis in the summer of 2020. In clearing out and organizing my files I came across much work in that I had not thought about or looked at in decades, as I am always more interested in what comes next, rather than what was. I was pleasantly surprised with what I found and decided to…
By Mark Brown
90 pages, published 7/30/2020
This book is a record of a sailing trip from Loreto to La Paz on the Sea of Cortez on a 45’ catamaran. The Sea of Cortez in a nautical and geographical wonderland - It is a warm tropical technicolor aquarium underwater and a harsh, stark and beautiful land above the waterline. It looks like the high red rock deserts of Utah and Arizona somehow met and united with the shores of Hawaii. Our expedition covered 10 days of personal history and 400…
By Mark Brown
150 pages, published 6/19/2020
We spend our lives in conversation, talking to each other all day every day. Considering how much we have to say it is remarkable how little we remember from day to day of what anybody said to us. This book is a compendium of very memorable things that people have said to me over my lifetime, and the stories behind those conversations. It is mostly sequenced in the order that these unforgettable quotes were spoken to me and is an…
By Mark Brown
90 pages, published 5/29/2020
These photos were taken during the 2020 Covid -19 pandemic. After my gym closed I started to take long walks every day, shooting pictures of the deserted ghost town downtowns near my home in Mountain View, CA. I also took long walks by the San Francisco Bay. I had never done street photography on a sustained basis before, having done it only short term in locales such as London, Paris or New York. As shelter in place orders were declared, the…
By Mark Brown
68 pages, published 3/20/2020
The artworks in this volume cover a span of many years when I was finding my way and getting established as an artist and include piles of bricks, stacks of rocks, snow creatures, small model sailboats, skateboards, sculptures, drawings, ceramics, photographs, paintings, etchings, photo etchings, stained glass and my first forays into the digital realm. It is illustrated with many photos and includes an introduction.
By Mark Brown
60 pages, published 2/19/2020
This book was created after a 2 week trip driving around Iceland. It is a strange and magnificent other worldly landscape. There are 150 volcanoes and glaciers calving icebergs into lagoons. There are ice caves and lava caves. Waterfalls are everywhere. The aurora borealis sometimes appears at night.The weather is variable and ever changing. Everything in Iceland is on a scale that dwarfs all other landscapes. All is vast, beautiful, enormous…
By Mark Brown
146 pages, published 1/18/2020
This book is a record of a 3 month, 12,000 mile trip that my wife and I made crossing America twice; first driving on northern roads and returning through the south and southwest. We wanted to see and savor all of what America was, is, and is currently becoming; naturally, geographically, geologically, ecologically, zoologically, economically, historically, ethnically, culturally, gastronomically and politically. That vast stretch of America…
By Mark Brown
116 pages, published 6/6/2018
This book consists of my American landscape images coupled with short personal stories/essays about the areas depicted in the images. It is comprised of spreads, with the images on the left side and the corresponding stories on the right facing pages. The landscape images are sequenced geographically, from West to East, starting at the Kalalau Valley on Kauai, Hawaii and ending in Cape Cod, at the Eastern tip of Massachusetts, spanning all of…
By Mark Brown
88 pages, published 6/7/2019
Amiable Animals - Curious Creatures and Interspecies Friendship is an art and photo book. The first photograph I ever took was of an ostrich at the Bronx Zoo when I was seven years old. That same day I rode an elephant. We had a smorgasbord of pets in my early years: a pair of raccoons, a donkey named Puzzle, an ultra white furry Nordic Samoyed Dog and a Rastafarian haired Briard Sheep Dog, Neon Tetra Fish, Siamese Fighting Fish, Parakeets,…
By Mark Brown
70 pages, published 4/2/2018
This book consists of aerial photos, taken over the last 30 plus years. I love the vast vistas that open up as one ascends, the mountains peeking through the clouds, the fractured geometry of farmlands, impossibly angular canals, dykes, reservoirs and water projects, gridded cityscapes, forests, fires, rugged expanses of wilderness, lakes, seas, endless oceans and the spectacular panorama of clouds on the move, capped with turbulence, rumbling…
By Mark Brown
76 pages, published 3/11/2019
This is a book featuring photos of the American Flag in America.In the United States, American flags are ubiquitous. Also known as Old Glory, the Stars and Stripes and the Star Spangled Banner, they fly atop tall buildings, in front of houses, schools, post offices, city halls, government buildings of all kinds, country clubs, businesses, municipal swimming pools and are prominently featured in sporting events and parades. Many of the photos…
By Mark Brown
90 pages, published 5/8/2019
This book is a compendium of photographs that combine images and words - some intentional and some entirely happy linguistic and visual accidents. I have been a visual artist and a writer for most of my life, so I have a deep and abiding fondness and love for both words and images, as this book demonstrates. At its most basic level, photography is a form of non-verbal communication. When words are added to images, a new layered form of dialogue…
By Mark Brown
88 pages, published 4/23/2019
Happiness is contagious. Happiness can be an elusive, evanescent, elastic, fleeting, ever changing moving target. From an early age we are taught to “Kiss the joy as it flies by” as William Blake put it centuries ago. By kissing that joy he concluded that we could then “Live in eternity’s sunrise.”As the Dali Lama wrote: “Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions. If you want others to be happy, practice…
By Mark Brown
90 pages, published 10/26/2018
It has been said that in Heaven there are only two sounds, Songs and Silence. While I have often embraced silence, I love songs and music even more. To my ear there is nothing more simple, purely and profoundly beautiful than two or more people singing or playing music together in harmony. “Music Self Played is Happiness Self Made” is what one of my early piano study books boldly declared on the cover. This book consists of photos and stories…
By Mark Brown
90 pages, published 11/26/2018
Where ever you go, whatever you do, something dark is always following you. Shadows are everywhere when ever there is a source of light, be it a lamp on your desk or the sun, 93 million miles away from the ground you are walking on. Reflections are almost everywhere also, though not quite as ubiquitous as shadows. Mirrors are often one of the first things we see on any given morning after taking a shower, showing us our naked selves staring back…
By Mark Brown
66 pages, published 8/17/2018
Landscapes are a series of digital art works that express my love of the natural world and provide a graphic visual diary of my adventure travel. These images began as analog or digital landscape photographs. They have been turned into a cross between woodcuts and photographs, They are presented in two page spreads, the images complementing each other geographically, geologically, emotionally or compositionally. They are calm, meditative and…
By Mark Brown
64 pages, published 9/12/2018
This book features images of rivers, clouds, volcanoes, geyesers, multi million dollar fountains, koi and trout and adrenaline junkie kayakers, among many other photogenic subjects. Geographically it is a world wide image tour, featuring photos from Hawaii, Switzerland, Sedona, the Grand Canyon, Idaho and Montana, among many others.
By Mark Brown
30 pages, published 8/16/2018
NightBlooms are a series of digital art works that explore the space in which Nature and Technology merge and multiply. From my garden I harvest flowers and scan them with a desktop scanner. I use the scanner as a camera, shooting each image from below. Flowers are placed on top of the scanner with the scanner lid left open. I do a large number of scans until I have all of the picture elements I need for an image. I then compose the images using…
By Mark Brown
24 pages, published 8/16/2018
LeafLines are a series of natural/digital art works that use leaves to create dynamic negative space made by the visual interplay of the color, texture and shape of individual leaves against a solid background color. The images are calligraphic and have a visual vibrancy and intensity created by the figure/ground relationship of the leaves with the background space. They are created by scanning individual leaves and compositing the artwork in…
By Mark Brown
34 pages, published 8/16/2018
Slices of Life are a series of collages that I made in the 1980’s after finishing graduate school. Suddenly without a printmaking studio, I returned to single image analog art making. I began to make collages from old books and cards. I recently decided to collect all of the wild and colorful images from this series into a book. I was initially imspired by Max Ersnt’s collage novels. This series really got going when a friend gave me many bags…
By Mark Brown
30 pages, published 8/16/2018
This book is an updated remake of a series of images I made in graduate school in the early 1980’s of fingers, figures and feet. I recently scanned the negatives I had originally made photo etchings and photo silkscreens from, and was able to remake the images far better with digital technology than my analog methods from long ago..
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