"Family Portrait"
1960
medium
size

From the Berkeley Art Museum:

"Family Portrait includes images of Brown herself, her second husband, artist Manuel Neri, and the family's pet bull terrier, Bob the Dog. Bob also appears in an untitled painting with Brown and Neri's son, Noel, who was born in August 1962. During the early 1960s Brown focused her attention on various aspects of her personal life, primarily her young son and their surroundings at home, where Brown had moved her studio to be near him. As Brown explained, "I feel a deep need to put into visual form all aspects of my own life."

Characteristic of Brown's work from this period is her love of thick layers of brilliantly colored oil paint. Using large trowels and house-painting brushes, she applied the paint right out of gallon cans, painting wet into wet, to create images characterized by bright, dissonant color and brisk, raw sensation. Faith-fulness to detail and anatomical accuracy gave way to a purely spontaneous way of rendering human form in near-abstract terms. In these exuberant paintings the artist recorded the essence of the human condition -- its seriousness, hopefulness, and joyfulness was reflected in her own life."