10 minute read
ROGER BROWN IN LA CONCHITA
Opposite Rosa Californica, 1994, courtesy of the Roger Brown Estate and Kavi Gupta. In the late 1980s, tiring of Chicago winters, Roger Brown (1941-1997) searched for a place to build a winter studio in a warmer climate. He was drawn to southern California, in part because it was the last place that he and his partner, George Veronda (1940-1984), traveled together before Veronda died. When he discovered the property at 6754 Ojai in La Conchita––a single lot with a fence, grass, carport, and a 1955 Spartan trailer––he knew it had to be his next home. La Conchita (“little shell” in Spanish) is a modest beach community south of Santa Barbara. In addition to the lush local flora, dozens of exotic varieties of bananas were grown in La Conchita, despite the prevailing view that banana farming was not viable in California. Brown may have intuited that it was a good place for a home and garden.
The “Royal Mansion” Spartan trailer parked at 6754 Ojai sparked Brown’s interest in the property. The Spartan was designed in 1955 by the Getty Corporation, which manufactured Spartan Aircraft Trailers beginning in 1945 in a retrofitted aircraft factory in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a post-war effort to provide much needed inexpensive housing for returning veterans. Spartans were streamlined beauties and came in five sizes: Spartanette (the smallest), Manor, Manor Tandem, Mansion, and Royal Mansion. Brown purchased 6754 Ojai in 1988, and moved into his Spartan Royal Mansion.
In a surprise departure from his previous work with plants and gardens, Brown first created an austere, Asian-style raked gravel garden with islands of rock and subtle greenery––an elegant and spartan setting for his elegant Spartan. He lined the east border with rose shrubs in a stone bed––beginning, we think, his fervent interest in rose cultivation that was fully explored in his New Buffalo, Michigan, garden, where he planted over 400 rose shrubs in many varieties in 1993 and 1994. His interest in roses was further expressed in his sequence of four Rosa paintings made in 1993 and 1994.
As writings in Brown’s sketchbook indicate, the Royal Mansion was perfect in many ways. He found a dwelling that reflected his visual vocabulary and design ethos essentially. He appointed the Spartan with furnishings that harmonized with the Spartan’s streamlined design, including Russel Wright dinnerware. The Spartan became his muse and museum.
Brown’s La Conchita home and garden were ideal, aesthetically, but lacked space for a studio. Brown rented studio space nearby for a time, but he eventually commissioned Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman to design his La Conchita “Temple of Painting.” It’s been said that he traded his painting, Stanley Tigerman in his Domain for the design of his La Conchita home. After ludicrous and protracted struggles with neighbors and the Ventura County Planning Commission, which he expressed in his 1989 painting, Citizens Killing Themselves After Having To Deal With the Ventura County Coastal Planning Commission (if you’re dreaming of California it doesn’t matter where you played before California is a whole new game), the house, carport, and garage were completed in 1993.
Handsome and broad-shouldered, part barn, part basilica, with Romanesque clerestory, Brown’s new home had walls of stucco painted a deep salmon-pink, inspired by the color of the La Purisima Mission in nearby Lompoc. Brown planted a formal line of six full-size Mexican Fan Palms (Washingtonia Robusta) along the front, scaled perfectly to the proportions of the house. A row of skyrocket junipers lined the rear, and a plump agave anchored the front of the Spartan, which was tucked in the rear corner of the property after the house was constructed, despite seemingly insurmountable zoning conflicts. Brown prevailed and the Spartan remained.
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Brown ramped up his discipline of looking, finding, and acquiring objects of interest. He combed area thrift shops, yard sales, and swap meets, often accompanied by his dear friend Linda Cathcart. He regularly returned with a car full of treasures and decked out his La Conchita “Temple of Painting,” inside and out, with carefully composed arrangements of furniture and objects. Brown shifted gears from the types of objects he collected for his homes in the Midwest (Chicago and Michigan), scoring a range of 1950s black panther items in ceramic, pressed copper, and a grand hooked rug, Mexican dia de los muertos papier maché skulls, Japanese geta, a vintage Schwinn bike, a giant shell, a swoopy pink vinyl chaise longue, a poster of James Dean, and, as country auction bills say, “items too numerous to mention.” The general palette was dominated by bright pastels, and Brown’s arrangements complemented Tigerman’s open, airy floorplan.
Brown voraciously gathered ceramic objects of all kinds, limited only by the parameters of: the ordinary and accessible. He collected pots of all shapes and sizes made by amateurs, regional factory-made wares, Mexican pottery by families or studios, and everything in between. Many of his home and garden arrangements featured shelves or cabinets filled with ceramic objects, arranged as distinct settings. The discipline of arranging ceramic objects on shelves was distilled in his series of 27 Virtual Still Life object paintings created in 1995 and 1996. La Conchita was Brown’s third intentionally-created home setting, combining architecture, collected objects, a studio at the center, and a garden. His evolving architectural, collecting, and gardening life, invariably expressed in his work, flourished in the last chapter of his life, in La Conchita.
Moving to California from the Midwest, where gardening and attention to plants was intertwined in his creative life, Brown entered a year-round growing season and an expanded palette, including desert plants. He adapted quickly to the regional, casual habit of allowing plants and planters and planted pots and plantings, all to accumulate and grow and flourish in impromptu arrangements, both casual and formal. Brown’s La Conchita garden evolved through a few distinct styles and stages of growth; working on and in it was closely linked to and reflected in his paintings from these years. Brown filled the side and rear gardens with a combination of desert and deciduous plants and flowers, including white roses, calla lilies, varieties of agave, prickly pear, barrel cactus, columnar cactus, euphorbia, cholla, aloe, bonsai, and other plants, arranged among rocks, plinths, planters, and garden sculpture. Brown’s composition had a pleasing rhythm of ground-hugging and sky-reaching plants that quickly grew to surround and enclose the space in a kind of Arabesque, private garden. Reflecting the peacock motif in several midcentury decorative objects in his home, Brown added a cage with a cascading fountain for Jack and Jill, a pair of live peacocks, garden guardians and possibly the bane of his neighbors and his beloved bulldog Elvis.
Following his series of 27 Virtual Still Life object paintings Brown created a series of five sublime paintings of bonsai in 1996. Surely related to his cultivation of bonsai in his garden, these paintings reverse the scale of bonsai as miniature trees, positioning miniature humans against monumental bonsai. Brown imbued these works with the feeling of a departure into a different realm, a different dimension. Brown lived with HIV/AIDS, and despite his deteriorating health, and perhaps due to awareness of his mortality, he poured enormous energy into multiple projects in the last few years of his life: planting 400+ rose shrubs in his Lake Michigan dunes/ garden landscape; transforming his weedy Chicago backyard into a formal garden; designing an adobe home for property he bought in Lompoc, Calif., and a complex garden combining elements of architecture and horticulture, for land next to his childhood home in Alabama (both of these were realized on paper only). In 1996 he began plans to buy an 1870s-stone building in Beulah, Alabama, and renovate it for his last home and studio. He drew plans for the renovation and collected art and objects for it. He died on November 22, 1997, shortly before the scheduled real estate closing. His parents and brother bought the building and lovingly restored it as the Roger Brown Rock House Museum.
Roger Brown was an extraordinarily generous School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) alumnus, having given his Michigan property and collection in 1995, and the Roger Brown Study Collection (RBSC) in 1996 to the School. He bequeathed the La Conchita property and collection and all his own artworks unsold at the time of his death to SAIC. Lacking a vision or the means to secure and operate the La Conchita property, it was sold in 1998, with the proceeds supporting the RBSC and the New Buffalo facility. Prior to the sale, the home, collection, and garden were documented thoroughly. The collection was moved to Chicago where it was stored and periodically unpacked and explored. The Spartan was moved to the garden of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, in Culver City, Calif., where it is situated in the museum’s courtyard adjacent to a Spartanette, a smaller version of Brown’s Spartan Royal Mansion.
Ten distinct arrangements of furniture and objects had been reconstituted for the exhibition Roger Brown: Calif. U.S.A., and were shown with a selection of Virtual Still Life object/ paintings. Curated by Nicholas Lowe, with SAIC students and RBSC staff, the show was on view in 2010 at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. Kavi Gupta exhibited five arrangements in the 2016 exhibition Roger Brown and Andy Warhol: Politics, Rhetoric, Pop. All 10 arrangements have been retained In Kavi Gupta inventory, for study and exhibition. Coinciding with this auction, the show Roger Brown: La Conchita opens at Kavi Gupta (219 N. Elizabeth St., Chicago). Comprised of Brown’s home arrangements and Virtual Still Life works, the show will be on view from November 10 to January 9.
Arrangements and Virtual Still Life works will be in the exhibition Roger Brown: Virtual Still Life, curated by Shannon Stratton, William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator, opening May 2, 2019, at the Museum of Art and Design, New York.
Most of the objects in the La Conchita collection were second-hand when found and rescued by Brown, from antique shops, thrift stores, and other places where pre-used items are sold. After 20 years in deep storage, objects in the La Conchita home collection will be rescued again and find new homes with the help of Leslie Hindman’s adept auctioneers. We thank Leslie Hindman staff members Corbin Horn and Zachary Wirsum, and of course Leslie Hindman.
Lisa Stone Curator, Roger Brown Study Collection School of the Art Institute of Chicago
We gratefully acknowledge and thank the following former and present SAIC staff for their commitment to Roger Brown’s magnanimous gifts and legacy:
Carol Becker
SAIC Dean of Faculty SAIC (2003-2007), Associate Dean (1991-2003), Faculty (1978-1991)
Tony Jones
SAIC President (1986 – 1991), Chancellor (2010-2012)
Elissa Tenny
Jana Wright
SAIC Executive Director of Academic Administration (1973 – 2007)
Thanks to Patty Carroll for use of her photos of the La Conchita “Temple of Painting.”
Born in the South and living much of his adult life in Chicago, the multidisciplinary artist Roger Brown turned his sights westward in his final years. Inspired by the landscape and culture of the Southwest, Brown built a home and artistic environment in La Conchita, California, which he deemed his ‘Temple of Painting.’ His home and garden expressed multiple facets of Brown’s late-career developments,examining the formal relationships between Brown’s artistic manifestations during his time in La Conchita – including his iconic paintings, the innovative ‘Virtual Still Life’ series (in which he arranged specific objects on a shelf in front of a landscape painting), and assemblages. Brown’s interest in repetition and architectural gridding was paramount throughout his entire oeuvre. The ordered geometry of his paintings extended to his selfmade environments. An active collector and supporter of folk and non-mainstream arts, Brown’s accumulation of objects became its own creative outlet – groupings became curated assemblages, sharing the language of his paintings. Specific to his time in La Conchita, ‘Virtual Still Life’ became the most elusive and enigmatic series of his storied career, a culmination of a lifetime dedicated to artistic experimentation.
David Mitchell, Associate Director, Exhibitions, Kavi Gupta
