Artist captures moment water becomes wine in painting
This is the moment between water and wine.
The metallic gold, the variations of red and purple combine to tell the story of Christ’s miracle.
But it’s this moment, that microcosm of a second, that Eric J. Brown wanted to catch.
“How does water turn into wine?” he asked. “And what happened in that moment? It was a miracle, and it’s a beautiful miracle.”
Brown stands back to look at his painting. He titled it “Water into Wine,” something viewers won’t immediately recognize until reading the title. And even then, they may not see it.
And that’s OK. Brown knows his paintings aren’t presented so much through images but through text, a text that comes to him in dreams.
Images from those dreams can be seen in the exhibit Text & Context: Eric J. Brown, which runs through Monday, Jan. 23, in the Manship Theatre Gallery in the Shaw Center for the Arts.
Now, painting was an unlikely career choice for Brown.
“I was a filmmaker, not a painter,” he said. “I wanted to be the next Spike Lee.”
But God had other plans for Brown.
Brown grew up in New Jersey but moved to Baton Rouge to attend Southern University. He transferred to William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J., to study film and eventually enrolled in the New York University Film School.
He moved back to Baton Rouge with his mother, a Baker native. She became ill and wanted to live near family.
Brown thought his future was set, but then he had a conversion. “That’s what I would call it,” he said. “I was praying to the creator, and I was asking what I should do. He told me to paint. I’m not even good at matching clothes, so how was I going to paint?”
Still, Brown couldn’t think of anything else. Three months passed, and a voice kept telling him to paint. He couldn’t rest until he picked up a paintbrush.
“I started painting, and I haven’t stopped,” he said.
Brown was still living in New Jersey at the time. He hadn’t told friends or family about his new venture, and some still don’t understand his decision today.
But how can anyone clearly explain a call from God except to say that it’s a calling?
And Brown definitely sees his artwork as a calling, because it’s something that even he doesn’t fully understand. At first glance, his paintings appear to be a series of horseshoe-shaped figures layered in colors.
Brown calls the figures text, something meant to be read, but its meaning hasn’t been revealed to him.
“Maybe some day, someone will come along who can read it,” Brown said. “They can tell us what it means. But for now, the creator gives me this text in my dreams. I see it in three dimension, and I paint it on the canvas.”
Some people have scoffed, which bothered Brown at first.
“But I’ve developed a thick skin,” he said. “It really doesn’t bother me anymore.”
Still others have developed their own perceptions of Brown’s work. Even if they don’t understand the context of his paintings, they like his abstract style.
It has a way of grabbing and holding viewers’ attention.
Brown paints his pieces in such a way that they change as the light changes and as the viewer moves from one side to the other. Brown’s thoughts behind each piece can be interpreted in different ways.
A viewer can categorize the painting in the context of everyday life, which is fine.
“That might be how they see it,” Brown said. “And the paintings can refer to that. But I see the paintings according to the word.”
For instance, Brown was studying the Book of Revelations when creating his painting “Emerald.”
The piece shines, almost sparkles in a metallic glow.
“People are uneasy when they read Revelations,” Brown said. “They think of it as the end, but they sometimes miss how beautiful this book is. It spend a lot of time talking about the beauty of Heaven and what’s in store for us there. It talks about the streets of gold and the shining city.”
And he read the New Testament story of Christ’s turning wine into water when he painted “Water into Wine.”
“I wanted to capture that moment,” Brown said. “This is the moment between the wine and water. Some people are skeptical about this story today. They speculate that he switched the wine for the water when no one was looking, but in the Bible, the people saw it happen, and they said it was the best wine.”
And in this context, the moment become clear. Brown’s text is more concentrated in this painting, as if painted in tight knots. This is the miracle as it happens, just before the molecules of water give way to make wine.
The colors also tell the story. Brown chooses purple and metallic golds and coppers in his references to Christ.
Purple was a color associated with royalty, and gold was associated with wealth.
“People think of Christ as a man who wasn’t wealthy, but he was,” Brown said. “His wealth was in the spirit, and he offers us that same wealth.”
Brown walks through the gallery, telling the stories behind each of his paintings, stopping at a glass exhibition case holding three glass vessels. They’re ruby red.
A nearby case holds four onyx vessels, and three taller vessels stand on the floor beside the gallery window.
Each vessel holds the rolled canvas of one of Brown’s paintings, and each painting is sealed seven times.
“The seven seals represent the seven seals in Revelations,” he said. The paintings are completed works, some of which are Brown’s favorites. He admits that it was difficult not to frame them. “But I have to remember that these are not for me,” he said. “These are for the creator. These are the ones I knew I had to seal, and maybe some day someone will discover these vessels and unseal these works and will have the ability to read them.”
The Dead Sea Scrolls were Brown’s inspiration for this idea, and again, the text in these pieces awaits interpretation. It’s artwork to be enjoyed, yet the spiritual meaning stands strong.
“Each figure stands alone as text like Asian text,” Brown said. “And in places like Asia, text is sacred. Here, we take it for granted.”
But Brown doesn’t, and he strives to develop the text in different media. Two wire sculptures from his “Manna” series are included in this show, which, by the way, is on the fourth floor in the Shaw Center for the Arts.
One sculpture was created from copper wire, the other from various metals. Both have been shaped in three-dimensional versions of the text seen in his paintings.
“This is more like how I see the text in my dreams,” Brown said.
And both sculptures are representations of manna as cascaded from Heaven onto the Israelites when they had nothing to eat after their exodus from Egypt.
“What does manna look like?” Brown said. “We don’t know. We only know that angels eat it. And we know that it is a gift from God.”
This exhibition marks the debut for Brown’s larger sculpture. He showed it as a work in progress at Stabbed in the Art. His work also has been locally exhibited at Ann Connelly Fine Art.
And after this show, he is going to focus on creating smaller pieces.
“I’m still going to do the bigger pieces, but the smaller ones will be more accessible to people,” he said. “I consider each of my pieces a book unto itself.”
More accessibility will mean more people who will have the text.
This is part of Brown’s spiritual mission as an artist — spreading the word.