About Matt Brown
2023: Best in Show award at Bruce Museum 42nd Annual Outdoor Art Festival (Oct. 7 & 8, 2023).
2020: Set up The New Leaf Gallery, a gallery specializing in contemporary hand-made prints originally based in Keene, NH. TNLG is currently located in downtown Lyme, NH.
2017: Established Matt Brown Fine Art, LLC, a gallery in downtown Lyme showing the work of residents of Lyme, NH and next door Thetford, VT.
1997: Birth of son Asher.
1995: Became state-juried member of the League of NH Craftsmen, established the printmaking business "Ooloo Press".
1993: Began making color prints using the Japanese hanga method.
1992: Birth of son Nathaniel.
1990: Married Elizabeth Page.
1981-1995: Worked as carpenter, cabinet-maker, and builder of cabinets, houses, and barns.
1981: Graduated magna cum laude, Harvard College, as an art and architecture major.
1958: Born in Boston, Mass.
I graduated from college in 1981 hoping to work with my hands. By 1986 I had set up my own building contracting business doing new house construction, renovations, additions, and several post-and-beam barns. In 1987 I built a three-story cabinet and carpentry shop. This is where I now make, with help, my woodblock prints.
My printmaking owes much to the earlier years of carpentry. Learning to work with wood, to line things up and judge by eye, to draw up plans and build ideas into 3 dimensions: this was my printmaking apprenticeship. Materials are now pigments, carved woodblocks, and paper; the pursuit is with line, shape and color; but it feels I am still building, following a process of visualizing, analyzing things into parts, and putting hand to tool to build, step-by-step.
Framing and shipping happens in a space in downtown Lyme, an art gallery I own and operate called Matt Brown Fine Art, (1 Main St. Lyme, NH). This is the former space of the Long River Studios, and we sell and feature there locally hand-made work. Specializing in fine art, craft and books made by residents of Lyme, NH and Thetford, VT (past and present) in this gallery, I also dabble in collecting and selling Japanese prints: kabuki actor prints (yakusha-e) by Japan's most successful (in his lifetime) and prolific artist: Utagawa Kunisada, aka Toyokuni III (1789 - 1865), some prints by shin-hanga artists Hiroshi Yoshida and Kawase Hasui.
Sunapee Fair, August, 2013
About the Hanga Method
If you print with metal machinery, such as a printing press, you'll find it best to work with oil. If you print with water, it works better to print by hand, using a baren. Having used water as the medium for art and writing for over 1000 years, and building on a tradition of disciplined use of the human body in the production of craft, Japan hosts the world's strongest tradition of printing with color, and with water. The 100-year heyday of Japan's ukiyo-e print industry began in the 1760's. The ukiyo-e art tradition offers lots to emulate.
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Self-taught in my printmaking, I began my experiments working the craft of color woodblock printmaking using Japanese methods in January, 1993. My teachers are trial and error, studies of prints and books about prints, and fortuitous visits and conversations with other printmakers. I have also learned a great deal from teaching.
I feel grateful to the work of generations of artists and craftsmen in the pursuit of this craft that I love, many Japanese, but not all. Hiroshi Yoshida, Kawase Hasui, Walter Phillips, Arthur Dow, Frank Morley Fletcher, these are hanga printmakers whose prints and published books on the subject I have found especially helpful. I am deeply indebted to the work of David Bull, who over the last 40 years has wonderfully shared aspects of hanga printmaking worldwide, and the friendship and guidance of Bill Paden, who learned from Cliff Karhu and lived and taught for years in NYC.