William Brown

  printmaker / painter,   Wales / U.K.

I was born on the shores of a large grey Canadian lake forty-odd years ago.
I cannot recollect a time when I did not make pictures.
I have an early memory however of a museum visit in Toronto
and my surprise at seeing a roomful of pictures of a
dumpy little man with an assortment of hats on.

This was (I realised this much later) the touring exhibition of Rembrandt´s self portraits and it subtly impressed on me that all paintings do not have to be beautiful -at least conventionally so. Socratic pronouncements such as "the unexamined life is not worth living", don't mean much to a five year old boy but I do remember wondering at the time why he had painted his own aging -and financial- decline. Later I discovered the vast canon of Rembrandt's graphic work but that first "lesson" has been the most enduring.