William Brown

ArtistRobotic painting

Nov 6

Written By Claudia Elliott

William Brown's current project, Paintings for a Robot, uses digital techniques to generate montage images intended for rendering by robotic painting devices.
This brave new world of machine fine art painting signals a new singularity between photography, digital image manipulation, and oil painting. Distinctions between these seemingly unique media will collapse Mr. Brown believes.
Mr. Brown is well aware that creating images that challenge the massive commercial enterprise that painting has become is possibly a fool’s errand.
Successful dealers, artists, and collectors have ascended to a sort of Valhalla of self-importance and avarice that won’t easily be made obsolete by the pioneers of machine-based painting.
There is a charging at windmills aspect to this work, but Mr. Brown believes in the imperative of a more efficient painting methodology based on the new robotics.
He is currently working with Art Matr in Red Hook New York, the creator of the most advanced robotic painting system to date.
William Brown left graduate school in psychology to become a photographer in the early 1970s.
After receiving an MFA from the University of Florida he helped found the Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta and the studio program at Emory University where he taught for over 40 years.
His work merges conventions from photography, film, sculpture, and painting. Mr. Brown has an extensive international and national showing history primarily in video.
His current project, Paintings for a Robot, uses film editing techniques to randomly generate merged images intended for future rendering by robotic painting devices.