Zino Brown expresses himself in Then to Now art exhibition

ZINO BROWN’S paintings are personal and profound reflections of his life experiences. These paintings will be on display during his first TT solo exhibition, Then to Now, beginning on Saturday at The Frame Shop – A Space Inna Space gallery, Carlos Street, Woodbrook.

The inspirations for the 32-year-old’s oil paintings come from two main sources: the relationships in his life, and the images and feelings he gets when he has seizures, which were brought on after he was in a car crash in Seattle in 2016.

“When you come out of a seizure, you’re very confused. Sometimes you don’t know your own name. Sometimes it’s like a dream, sometimes it’s like you have these vivid feelings and emotions and you want to express them but you can't and it's still bubbling in your head and then art became that for me, art became that life and what I can't express in words. A lot of my art has to do with that and what I'm trying to express after a seizure, how I feel after a seizure, sometimes it's a memory, sometimes you remember things. I paint in a kind of way to describe how I was feeling at a specific time but also describing the blurriness of the memory.

“After a seizure I may paint very heavily, I may paint in a way that everything is there, but it's confused, and you understand, but you still can't express yourself through words. You're always being asked these questions when you come out of a seizure to see how much you remember, to see how long it will take you to come out of this thing, and art is a way of – I don't want to say the word escape – art is a way of feeling comfortable in myself, dealing with being sick, dealing with the situation, expressing the situation as well, and in a way escape too.”

Brown’s paintings are dark and layered, with many details to be explored and discovered upon close scrutiny.

“North Fridays is a depiction of a memory of going outside after a seizure and seeing my girlfriend and people who were hanging out with her. I wasn't quite clear so I painted in a way where everything wasn't quite clear, it's dark and blurry, but that was an actual situation.

"In Things are Complicated, I painted a guy who didn’t understand how manic you get after a seizure. He was confused, and I represented myself as these two faces, the face that people know and understand but the other one is subconsciously or subliminally that other side that comes out during a seizure. He's looking away and he's holding his head but he's stressed about how any of this could go, he has to experience the completion of the dark night.

"Passing Judgements is an interpretation of the battle of sexes and the judgments through relationships, chaos and moving through jealousy, love and relationships. These could also be very personal. It's about judgment, that's an example of now coming out of a seizure.”

Brown said his earliest influence was Russian-French artist Marc Chagall. He said he admired the prolificity of artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Pablo Picasso, and the darkness of Goya’s work.

“There’s also an American artist called Miriam Beerman and Guyanese artist Denis Williams – those are the first ones that come to mind – and there are others that I’m impressed by that aren’t necessarily famous.

"I have a complex with looking at and researching people’s works, because I think my subconscious will absorb too much from it, so I try to stay away from that. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s part of my individuality as an artist. I’m trying to change to be more open to looking at things, but I really want to print what’s in my mind, how I want it to be, as free from other influence as possible.”

Brown’s love affair with art began in childhood, when his mother Debbie Jacob, Newsday columnist and former journalist, teacher and librarian, would buy him paints and allow him to paint on the walls.

“I was always drawing. When I attended high school at the International School, I did AP Art, I always did art in school.

"I got distant from art after high school, through life and wanting to accumulate stuff and make money. I went on like that for a while and then I got attacked in a Carnival fete and left here.

"I went to Toronto in 2013, where I worked in construction, and I used to put little artistic finishing touches on things like staircases. I never lost the creativity.”

After his status in Toronto expired, Brown moved to Seattle, where he studied wood technology at Seattle Central College’s Wood Technology Center.

“I studied anything to do with the manipulation of wood. I was fascinated by the strength and the possibilities of what wood could be. I was working and sending myself to school because my mother couldn't afford it, so I was working graveyard shift at the bakery to pay for my school fees. I was averaging about three hours of sleep a night and I went on for about three years.

"Then I blacked out at the wheel and I had a bad car accident, cracked my skull in three places – and that was traumatic in itself, but I was also concerned that I wouldn't be able to work in the field that I had studied in.”

He developed seizures as a result of the skull fracture and was basically bedridden. It was during his recovery that he began painting again.

“After one of these seizures I remember lying down in bed at my ex-girlfriend's house and I saw some children's grade acrylic paints and some cardboard boxes and it all just came back to me and I started to express myself through this painting. I was painting so much that people thought it was manic because of how much I was painting. Eventually someone wanted to buy one of those cardboard box paintings for US$50 and then another wanted one for US$100.”

Brown went on to exhibit work in the US, with his first solo show at the Indie Genius gallery in Seattle.

“Other than that, a few other Caribbean places used to show my art, and a lot of people in California used to take interest in it. But keep in mind that (from) when I just started it's evolved so much, through the seizures and everything, it's become more and more personal. And so people in California through Instagram and the internet would contact me and the Caribbean places would hang it, and I sold a lot through those situations.”

Brown came to TT in early 2020 to visit his mother and ended up staying when the borders closed.

“I came down for a temporary visit to see how she's doing and maybe help her out a little bit, and then covid happened and I was unable to leave. In that way I basically lost my studio and everything up there, but I have a small studio in my mother's house. I was planning to move back after covid19 but I’m liking the trajectory and how it's going, the amount of work I’ve been able to do down here. I’m actually okay with staying here for a while, though I don’t know if I will hold myself to any place, but I think I will be staying in the Caribbean in general.”

He said people often ask how covid19 has affected his art.

“It's become more personal and darker in terms of the colour and the material and the subject matter. I'm very personal about those thoughts, because I don't shy away from it when it comes to expressing myself on canvas or anything I'm using as a canvas to create it.

"So I would say yes, during covid19 it's brought me closer to my art. I'm a person who's introverted, and so once again it's my everything, it's my light and I've totally lost that way of thinking I had after high school. I couldn't imagine not doing art, to acquire money or to acquire some sort of status or nice things.”

Brown said people are coming to see the show because it is something different to what many people are exposed to.

“A lot of people don't really take to dark art, but I think I'm trying to break that mould, that expectation of what is good and bad art. It is important for anybody to come and try to connect to art, because one piece isn't specific to everybody and it's my way of having that conversation with the world and the public. I’ve always believed that art is push and pull, that it needs to test some kind of boundary or be different, and that's how it's always been throughout the ages right, something is new and people don't understand it, people don't like it because they don't understand it and later on it becomes, 'So this was actually good.' It's reading my thoughts and expression of life and everything like that. It's my truth, at the end of the day.”

The exhibition begins on Saturday and runs until April 17.

The gallery is open on Saturdays from 10 am-4 pm, and Monday to Friday from 9 am-5 am.

For more info: The Frame Shop. A Space Inna Space on Facebook and Asraphr65 on Instagram, or call 628-7508.