Striking "the Universal Heart Chord"
On his birthday, we salute contemporary painter Frederick Brown, who often listens to the Blues late at night, "when the creative spirits are loose," to inspire his artwork.
Brown explains his interest in that musical genre. "I grew up in Chicago. South Chicago, right across from the steel mills where a lot of people had migrated from Mississippi, Tennessee, and the South to work. And the Blues just came right on up the Illinois Central Railroad from the city of New Orleans. Chicago became the real repository of a southern culture, especially among the Black community. And they brought their music with them. People would work in the mills on the swing shift, and I grew up hearing the music."
Brown painted this portrait of Junior Wells, a harmonica player from Chicago, as part of a series in tribute to Blues artists. "Like the best painters," he states, "those musicians had the ability to strike the universal heart chord."
Learn more about Brown's artistic philosophy and the Blues in our QuickTime video clip.
QuickTime video
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Want to see another work by Brown? Then visit our traveling exhibition Modernism & Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which opens today at the National Academy of Design Museum in New York City.
Source: National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996).
Pictured: Frederick Brown, born 1945, Junior Wells, 1989, oil on linen, 36 x 30 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by William Cost Johnson, George Story, Robert J. Oliver and Grete Wagnor-Barwig.
On his birthday, we salute contemporary painter Frederick Brown, who often listens to the Blues late at night, "when the creative spirits are loose," to inspire his artwork.
Brown explains his interest in that musical genre. "I grew up in Chicago. South Chicago, right across from the steel mills where a lot of people had migrated from Mississippi, Tennessee, and the South to work. And the Blues just came right on up the Illinois Central Railroad from the city of New Orleans. Chicago became the real repository of a southern culture, especially among the Black community. And they brought their music with them. People would work in the mills on the swing shift, and I grew up hearing the music."