About Dr. Brown
Dr. Brown was born in Delaware County Pennsylvania, near
Philadelphia and Chadd's Forge, home of the
Wyeth and Pyle Families. He was
raised on Maryland's Eastern Shore, in the Choptank River town of
Cambridge, where he graduated high school.
He had a
casual interest in art from about age four years when he began to
copy the cartoon characters in newspaper comics sections.
However, it was not until high school that his art talent
became manifest. Having received a small set of oil paints as
a present and having no idea how to use them, he sought help from the
new, young art teacher, Mrs. Fran Applegarth (nee Griffin). She became his mentor,
a relation that still exists.
Mrs.
Applegarth 's exceptional ability as an art teacher is evident in
that two other members of the same class became recognized artists.
One is the Wyoming painter and sculptor
Mark Stewart and the other, the well-known wildlife painter
Dr. Robert Tolley who
continues to reside in Cambridge. Both are graduates of the
Maryland Art Institute. Over her many years as a teacher, Mrs. Applegarth has nurtured numerous significant artists
but never again three from the same class.
Dr. Brown
never attended art school. After serving in the U. S. Army, he became a pharmacologist, doing research
and teaching. He also studied psychology and is an
internationally renowned psychopharmacologist. He then
interned at the Boston VAMC and became a board certified
neuropsychologist specializing in brain injury rehabilitation and
diagnosis. He retired from private practice in 2007.
He
painted intermittently during his scientist, academician and clinician years.
Although not artistically trained, he utilized his knowledge of
anatomy, chemistry, physics (color, light) and psychology in his
paintings. Those years were a long period of trial-and-error
art training. In 1976, his critically acclaimed book, Brain
& Behavior, was published by Oxford University Press. He
drew most of the technical illustrations, some of which have been extensively reproduced.
He also developed an
appreciation of art particularly being influenced by the work of
Andrew Wyeth,
Grant Wood,
Norman Rockwell, and
Edward Hopper. Those influences are evident in his
paintings.
After
leaving Cambridge, Dr. Brown lived in Washington, DC, Philadelphia,
Wilmington, DE, Chicago, Winnipeg, Canada, Boston and, since 1971 in Florida, primarily the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area. He and his wife of 45 years
currently reside in Central Florida, in the city of
Mount Dora, a
famous art center. His series of
Mount Dora watercolors
continue to be widely exhibited, have won numerous competitions and
sell as postcards, tee shirts and fine art prints. He is
currently developing another series of Mount Dora paintings in
oils (see
Mount Dora Redux)
Since
retirement, he has been painting full time, in oils. In
commemoration of the 2011 60th reunion of his high school class, Dr.
Brown has completed a series of 18 oil paintings depicting
Cambridge as he remembers it in the late 1940's- early 1950's.
He has also written a novel
currently
available as a
kindle book.
All of Dr. Brown's art work prior to 1966 was destroyed due to
an unfortunate series of events in the 1950's. It was a
pleasant shock when an example was recently discovered by Mrs.
Applegarth while she was cleaning out her attic. The
painting is a small (6" x 8.5") 1951 watercolor of Cambridge
Creek:
