Joan Brown
Golden Gate, 1987
woodcut and lithograph
36.5 x 26.25 in.
edition of 80

Golden Gate was leveled at Magnolia Editions in Oakland, CA on a Steinmesse and Stollberg flatbed transfer press. Five separate runs were made from two blocks with Rick Dula reducing the block/image using hand tools between each run. Four subsequent lithographic runs were drawn by Joan Brown. The prints were pulled individually, and on one of the five woodblock colors gold leaf was applied by the artist. The artist then approved, signed and designated each impression.

Joan Brown

1938-1990

Joan Brown is one of the best known and well-loved artists to have emerged out of California during the 1960s. Although she began painting in an Abstract Expressionist manner while studying at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Arts Institute) during the 1950s, it is Brown’s figurative work that captured the attention of the public and critics alike. These paintings, which she began in the early 1960s, depict figures and locales drawn from the artist’s personal life in bold, exuberant color and spontaneous swathes of viscous paint. By the 1970s, Brown had become increasingly preoccupied with spirituality, and her paintings, often self-portraits, grew to incorporate both figures and symbolic images of totem-like animals. Also an accomplished printmaker, Brown produced at Magnolia a series of characteristically vivid lithographs and mixed media prints shortly before her tragic death in India, at the age of 52.