ATARAXIA

Art and culture surrounded Kel Brown throughout his life. Born in Blue Island, IL, and raised in Houston, TX, Brown started painting and drawing at an early age, later discovering and identifying with graffiti and street art. Following in the footsteps of other self-taught African-American artists from the global South, his upbringing continues to shape the tenor of his paintings to this day. An ever-evolving experiment in balance, harmony, shape, and form, Kel Brown’s work seeks to push abstraction into unexplored visual realms and awaken dormant consciousness in the viewer. Brown’s work is a product of both the shy and the overbearing; it is a visual symphony of duality, contradiction, oneness, and harmony. Heavily influenced by Hip-hop and Jazz, his work relies heavily on improvisation, workflow, and improvements on the fly.