UCA Farnham Fine Art Student Profile 2014 - James Brown

Tell us about your interests and how you develop your work

My primary interests lie within desire, advertisement and it's attachments of futility, things that go wrong, and non-verbal and verbal communicative tools. I am interested in a diverse range of themes such as advertising’s praise of newness, remedy, relief, belief and hope. Alongside this, I am also interested in really disparate universal moments from mass sexualised love, to hopelessness, uncertainty, devotion, sensation, to commercial seduction and psychoanalysis. 

I have always felt that art (specific works for me) are remedies. Art is a remedy, like music, you can lose yourself too it completely, as well as believing in it. Which is something I always strive to push for, creating a work that you can loose yourself too; that also reflect the needs of the society or viewer.


Throughout the majority of my degree, I found myself constantly questioning “what sort of artist do I want to be?” To be quite frank, I don’t think anybody truly knows the artist that they are as everything is unforeseen, but you build up a strong idea of the artist you would like to be through your interest in things, or what is important to you, visually, or more loosely what you ‘like’. Tutorials, reflection and the general incline towards a ending third year forced me to reflect upon what type of work I want to make and I also found myself making things that I thought were once important, all of a sudden meaning nothing and essentially shit. All of this helped refine my thinking alongside the time constraints and pressure of a deadline into producing a series of works that I made to own a space. 

Georges Bataille comments in the book "Uncovering Surrealism" ; "We enter art garlleries as we do the chemists’ he says, ‘seeking well presented remedies for accepted sickness."

I have always loved visceral works and have been heavily influenced by works that have a really strong connection to popular culture, and universal relatable forms, like advertising or doom and death as well as contemporary language that tell us something about where we are now, For instance, Jeff Koons Hoover pieces, Robert Rauschenberg cardboard packaging sculptures, Bruce Nauman’s neon text works and the minimalist simplicity in Dan Flavin sculptural installations. Study the greats, observe, learn and listen. I see works like the ones mentioned above and I completely want to own them so they are always pivotal points of reflection and voices in your head to compare yourself against. 




What is the most important lesson your have learned at UCA?

Art school is heaven but also pain. Stick to your guns.  Nothing is wrong and nothing is right. Don’t let money get in the way of an idea. Make something you believe in. The most significant thing is the struggle and time pressure to make work. Things will not come to you, you have to go out and claim them. Once you know what you want you are free. 

What are you planning next?

Continue making work! 

60 Second interview from earlier this year

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v7JVo4O6FU



www.jamesbrownart.tumblr.com