For self-taught artist Teddy Wayne Brown, art is both therapeutic and confrontational. While his acrylic paintings have stunning levels of visual richness and lush detailing, many of them also depict arresting scenes that juxtapose beautiful animals and landscapes with signs of manmade destruction. Fittingly, he considers his work to be conservation art rather than wildlife art, with its brightly colored tropical fauna turning tragic against devastated backdrops. The combined abundance and scarcity of such scenes have an irrepressible emotional charge beyond the formal sophistication of the compositions.
Brown’s realist aesthetic frequently turns to hyperrealism and surrealism, whether through his astonishingly detailed renderings of exotic animals or the threatening landscapes they occupy. In his work nature is at once complex, resilient and fragile. Man’s violence against the environment creates compositional scars in Brown’s work, erasing swaths of beautifully detailed forest, partially obstructing views of an expansive landscape, or partly concealing animals behind bars and other intrusions. The human devastation of nature, and Brown’s understanding of it, provides thrilling formal tension in each painting.