Most travellers return home with souvenirs; William Brown returns with folk memories from which he draws inspiration for his paintings. Back ‘upriver’ in his Welsh studio, he tosses his haul of collected myths and motifs into one big multicultural heap, where they have to learn to get along.
When he moved to Britain from his native Toronto thirty years ago, After living in Somerset, Avon, Devon and London, he moved to Mid Glamorgan to live and work 14 years ago. Brown brought with him the Canadian bears and moose and the French loup garou that have since shared his canvases with the Welsh phantom horse Mari Lwyd. Now a new wave of migrants has blown in from Tunisia, where Brown has been imbibing the Berber culture.
Their arrival is announced in the files of pictographic camels progressing back and forth, shooting-gallery-style, across bright Kilims that look like Rothko colour fields sown with characters. There’s a Marabout tomb and a cameo appearance by French poet Rimbaud, whose restless passage through life brought him, like Brown, to North Africa in the 1880s, then threw him back on his native shore with a poisoned leg which had to be amputated in Marseille. The leg bobs up, out on a limb, in the new diptych Rimbaud at Harar/The Missing Leg, among the usual miscellany of loose connections – astronomical, iconographical, comical - with which Brown’s compositions tend to be littered. “It’s a layered picture,” is his explanation.
Not a believer in abstraction, Brown uses narrative as “an excuse to hang the colour on”. As his narratives are becoming more layered, so are his colours. This season’s Brown bears, given the run of two 7ft canvases, have shed their loud primary-coloured tartan – perhaps out of respect for their Berber visitors - and come out in subtle shades of sugar plum pink. Has this former addict of tube colour started mixing his paints? “It’s a change,” he admits, before confessing that it’s probably just another excuse for titling the exhibition Raspberry Ripple.