William McClure Brown, 1953 – 2008

Many people in Wales and the West Country will remember the artist William Brown, who was based in this country from 1977 until his death; all those who knew him, and the many whose walls are graced with his work, are very sorry that he has died, after a long illness, aged 54.

Brown was born in Toronto, Canada, to Scottish parents who had recently emigrated there. He began his artistic career in Canada, and then came to Britain and moved to Somerset in 1977.  In 1987, Brown was employed as artist-in-residence at Woodford Junior School in Plympton, Devon, whose then deputy head, Carys Griffiths, became his second wife the following year.  Carys was later appointed as head of a school in South Wales and the couple moved to Bridgend in 1990 where William rapidly became a leading figure in the Welsh art community.  

A larger-than-life character who somewhat resembled one of the bears frequently depicted in his works, Brown was a one-off.  Despite a seemingly effortless, cornucopic talent, he rarely achieved the acclaim he deserved from the main contemporary art world, partly due to a failure to see that this irreverent, humorous and wonderfully eccentric man was actually unerringly serious about his art. Many individual art critics, gallery owners and collectors did recognise the depth of his ability, however, and his work was exhibited and collected extensively, including a major solo touring exhibition launched at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea in 1996.

William Brown’s work is marked with fluid draughtsmanship, assured use of colour, and masterly handling of a whole range of media. At first glance, much of his work is deceptively simple, deliberately achieving a childlike naïvity, but there is a depth to all his pictures which enables them to reward repeated viewing. 

His drive to create was such that he used whatever came to hand. He took great delight in relating that an exquisite, tiny etching of Morocco had been etched using his own urine in the absence of any other acid: he peed on it daily until the plate had been bitten.  The creative possibilities of all sorts of materials and activities were explored, from envelopes – he made correspondence into an art form – to cooking, using pastry to create a bas-relief portrait of a friend’s dog, for example.  He is best known, however, for his woodcut prints and for his bright, bold paintings, the largest of which included the whole of a railway bridge at Reading and a commission from Newport Museum and Art Gallery to paint a working double-decker bus.

Highly intelligent, widely read and friends with several notable poets, Brown’s work often included references to stories, myths and literature.  In Canada he had learned to speak French as well as his mother-tongue Scots-accented English, and to this he added the Welsh language in later years. Whether he spoke all or any of them fluently tended to depend on the listener’s own linguistic knowledge, since his conversation was invariably peppered with bits of all of them – a favourite piece of French colloquialism would be followed by a sentence or two gleaned from a Welsh children’s programme.  The folklore and writings of all three cultures infiltrated his work, to which he added his own imagined legends, such as ‘The Venus of Blaengwynfi’.

Still painting daily up to his final hospitalisation, William Brown died on 17 July 2008, after battling illness for many months: he is much missed.

Alison Bevan

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