Adam's The Deborah Brown Collection 1st October 2024

12 In 2021, at the suggestion of her longstand- ing friend and highly-regarded fellow-artist Philip Flanagan, we were delighted to be commissioned by Deborah Brown to create a catalogue of the art at her home in the small Donegal town of Ramelton, where she had lived for around two decades. Much of this was a fascinating collection of works by her artist friends and contem- poraries, and those who had particularly influenced the trajectory of her career, in some aspect or another. The range includ- ed handsome landscapes by her first art teacher and family friend, James Humbert Craig; stylish modernist compositions by Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone; and pictures by contemporaries of whom Deborah was particularly fond, such as Alice Berger Ham- merschlag, Terry Flanagan, William Scott and Basil Blackshaw. In addition, our remit was to catalogue the studio collection of Deborah’s own work, dating back to her teenage years, which had been periodically packed into the attic, studio and exterior stores of the property. This process was, to a significant extent, a journey into previously uncharted territory for both of us, and proved particularly thrill- ing. There were the more familiar, lyrical, ex- pressionist paintings that Deborah painted on her return from Paris in the early 1950s, which included a handful of previously un- recorded works, full of the joy and energy one might expect from this first mature body of work. Unexpected discoveries in- cluded abstract canvases painted in the late 1950s and early 1960s, carefully wrapped away and unseen since returning from their first ground-breaking exhibitions in Lon- don. There were elegant gestural paintings on paper that looked as fresh as they must have done when they were first completed and shown in 1974. These works are clearly more rooted in Eu- ropean and American art of the 1950s and 1960s than in an Irish or British context, and the viewer might immediately make con- nections with Pollock, Rothko, Burri or the Arte Povera group, although they have a genesis and a line of development that is entirely independent and driven by Deb- orah’s own approach to her work. They are a fascinating counterpart to the works acquired by her great friend Anne Crook- shank for the Ulster Museum, where she was Keeper of Art, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which included paintings by groundbreaking women artists such as Hel- en Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell. In the outside store (ostensibly a re-pur- posed garage carefully shelved and insulat- ed), we found major pieces from arguably one of the most innovative and daring se- ries of work in Irish art history, when Debo- rah began to add fibreglass constructions to monochromatic canvases, and break through the surface of the canvas and add other materials. Some pieces were instant- ly recognisable from their exhibition at the Ava Gallery in 2005, and subsequently at an excellent retrospective at the F.E.McWilliam Gallery, in 2012. To see these at close quar- ters, and be able to place them in chrono- The Calm Revolution of Deborah Brown