Some encounters stay with you not because of what was said, but because of what was felt. Meeting Theophilus Brown was one of those moments.
It came about through an exhibition, “I’ll Bet You Can’t Paint a Portrait: The Genesis of Bay Area Figurative Art Now” at Art Space 712 in San Francisco, where Brown served as juror. Being selected felt significant on its own. What I didn’t anticipate was that it would lead me to talking with him.
Across from History
When I talked with Theophilus, a.k.a. Bill, he was 90 years old. He wasn’t just someone with a long career. He was part of the history I had studied, a central figure in the Bay Area Figurative Movement and a man who had spent more than 50 years with his partner, painter Paul Wonner. Together they were woven into a chapter of American art that still matters — one that also shaped artists like Richard Diebenkorn, whose notes on painting I return to often, and whose sensitivity to color connects directly to the thinking of Josef Albers — an influence that has shaped the way I see and build color in my own work.
There is something genuinely strange and wonderful about meeting someone who lives in a book on your shelf. Someone whose work you have admired from a distance, whose career you know through images and essays, and then suddenly you are just talking with them.
I can only hope that at 90 I will still be creating. He may no longer have been working on large oil paintings, but he was making small, intimate collages of the male figure, quiet and focused. Age may have changed the nature of the material, but it didn’t dim his curiosity.
The Question I Always Ask
There’s something I tend to ask artists I admire, partly out of curiosity, partly because the answer tells me everything about how someone relates to their own work:
Do you ever rework old paintings? Paint over them? Start again?
He didn’t pause.
“Of course.”
Two words. No elaboration needed. In that simplicity was a lifetime of making and unmaking, a quiet insistence that the work is never precious, never finished in any final sense. It lives. It changes. You keep going.
I’ve thought about that answer many times since.
What Lingers
I came away from that afternoon with something I hadn’t expected. Not inspiration exactly, but permission. Permission to rework, to let go, to trust that the process matters more than the outcome.
The Bay Area Figurative Movement, its openness, its resistance to rigidity, its willingness to hold abstraction and representation in the same breath, has always resonated with me. But sitting with one of its last living voices made that resonance personal.
Some art history you read. Some of it, if you’re lucky, you get to sit across from over tea.
Explore Mountain Paintings → Explore Abstract Paintings →
Artist Series
This post is part of an ongoing series on artists who have shaped my practice. Each post explores a different figure whose work, ideas, or creative philosophy has left a mark on how I think about painting. Recent posts in the series include:
- Hilma af Klint and the origins of abstract art
- Bruno Lucchesi: a studio visit and the figurative tradition
- Josef Albers and the way color shapes perception
- Richard Diebenkorn: Notes to Myself and the creative process
Browse all posts in the Artist Series.
