Alice Dalton Brown

Alice Dalton Brown (born 1939, Danville, Pennsylvania) is an American realist painter who grew up in Ithaca, New York. Dalton Brown began her studies in France at the Académie Julian in Paris and at the L'Université de Grenoble. She entered Cornell University as an English major and later transferred to Oberlin College, where she received her BA in studio art in 1962. While at Oberlin, she studied art history with Wolfgang Stechow. From 1970 to 2005, she lived and worked in New York City. Dalton Brown currently lives in the Hudson Valley and in King Ferry, New York.

While living in rural upstate New York and after moving to New York City, Dalton Brown painted and drew barns from 1965 to 1977. A 2006 review of her solo retrospective of works on paper described these as offering "a moving, somewhat cinematic perspective on the power and vagaries of memory."[1] Becoming increasingly abstract, the barn imagery evolved into paintings like Shadow of Tree and Table, 1977.[2]

Dalton Brown is most interested in the evocative qualities of a subject and its personal associations as seen in the paintings Grand Westfield Porch, 1980 and My Westfield Window, 1980, and the pastels Retreat Grasses, 1990, and Aurora, Six Columns, 1991. Expressing mood, attitude, and ideas are key to understanding the meaning of her work: "The visual tension between controlled, linear, constructed elements and textured, disordered, active areas has always intrigued me. I still like to compose my images with these contrasts which I think have symbolic implications as well as visual interest and compositional strength."

Among her best known works are paintings and pastels of light and water often executed on a very large scale,[3] such as Horizon, 2000. Dalton Brown’s ability to capture light playing across a wall, on the surface of water, or passing through translucent drapery is a signature motif[4] and visible in Quiet Breathing, 2011. Her "eye for the supernal in the everyday"[5] is displayed in Whisper, 2001 and Blues Come Through, 1999. Framing devices are removed and location becomes ambiguous in paintings such as Long Golden Day, 2000 and Easy Blues, 2014.[6]

Recent paintings and pastels depict themes inspired by Dalton Brown's 2015 Visiting Artist Residency at the American Academy in Rome. Pastels like American Academy in Rome #7, 2015 extend ideas begun in the 1990s in Italy in works such as Tuscan Patio, 1994.