John Brown, b. Sarnia ON, July 4th, 1953, d. Toronto, ON, March 21st, 2020
Worse than cruelty is indifference. Cruelty is intentional: we can comprehend it and combat it. But you cannot fight that which is indifferent to your existence or make it care that you are suffering. I was working in the garden two days ago. Ina temperate climate, winter snow and cold are redeemed by the joy of seeing and hearing the world come back to life in spring: perennials push through the soggy ground, birds call out to mates, your cheeks feel the first flash of warmth in the sun’s rays.
But I had to stop. Because as my senses bore witness to the natural world springing back to life, my mind kept reminding me of the threat the Coronavirus was posing to our human world. And I could feel that nothing cared. Nature might be a womb that nurtures us, but it is not a mother who loves us. We are special only in our own eyes. The crocuses will blossom and the trees will bud with or without us.
Today– my birthday– the sun is the brightest it has been all year. There is a chill, yes, but the city is sunlit gold. And I cannot bear to look, because yesterday John Brown died.
Jack was my uncle, but he was really my brother and best friend and teacher in one person. He died and nature did not stop being beautiful and indifferent. It leaves me alone to mourn– and it keeps turning and being beautiful. And I cannot bear its silence. It should call out in sympathy, but it has nothing to say that can speak to our grief. Death is our tragedy, but nature’s means of renewal.
I have known Jack my whole life, but he became of supreme importance to me as a teenager. Once or twice a year I would leave the little mining town where I grew up to visit him in Toronto. The excitement would build as the bus sped down highway 69, intensify as it became the 400, wide with cars and trucks moving at southern Ontario speed, and reach a pitch as we turned onto Avenue Road for the final stretch to the bus station on Elizabeth Street. I still love Avenue Road- that is where I felt I had reached The City!
In retrospect, Toronto was much more provincial when I first visited, but it was the biggest city I had ever been to and its ranking in the league tables was irrelevant. Jack unlocked a secret world of art, punk rock, super cool clothes, new cuisines … but most of all, freedom.
Freedom from the conformity of my small town, but more importantly freedom to live as a creative subject. I am sure that the lives of he and his fellow artists had stresses and strains that I could not understand as a 13, 14, 15 year old boy, but I could understand that they did not get up for work at 5 am in the freezing winter to work at the nickle smelter like my dad. They would be going to bed at 5 am, after a day of painting, or film making, or video editing, or installation installing, and a night of German beer, music, talk, and new ideas.
I had only one thought at the time: “I have to live here!” In 1986 I moved to Toronto to start school York University. I lived with Jack and Howard Lonn in their studio on Richmond Street. Our lives were books and paintings and talk about art and culture and philosophy. Whether you are Milton or me, words cannot express how I felt that first year in Toronto. I felt as though my body had to grow larger, to become more capacious to contain the new ideas and experiences to which Jack introduced me. Life was total open-eyed childhood excitement, except that I was an adult (sort of) and could spend my nights in clubs listening to local bands that played their own songs– loudly. I felt a part of something that connected me to New York and London, but cutoff from my roots, (which is what I wanted at the time).
In other words the individual uses alcohol or drugs to enjoy http://www.heritageihc.com/buy3129.html levitra uk the consequences these substances have on the mind and body. Brinjal contains vitamin b-6, phytonutrients and fibers that are levitra fast delivery beneficial to one’s well being. You should not make extra consumption of such drug products which have been listed as follows: * People must consume such drug devices in the form of headache, sleeping disorder, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, confusion or fever etc. order viagra levitra discount levitra Undoubtedly recognized that cancer is considered the most threatening disease on the planet.Queen West then was not just a shopping destination: it was artist studios, the coolest bars, greasy spoons, and bookstores. A few blocks away was Kensington Market and its vintage clothing shops, reggae, punk, and the House of Spice, where we would get supplies for the curries on which we lived.
Jack painted and I went to school. If I could have picked my life I would have been an artist, but I lacked the talent. I was a fellow traveler in that world and not a participant. I learned from watching Jack paint and talking, incessantly talking with him, about art and art history. I learned two truths: One: that a painting should make us see something new. And two: real creativity is about inventing the rules the work obeys through the process of making it. Creativity is “working out” an idea: it is not just “expression.” If it were, everyone would be an artist. Most people are not artists precisely because they cannot give themselves over to the work, to let the idea work itself out through their eye and hand.
This process is what makes art art. Art is neither illustration, nor adornment, nor decoration; it is not story telling, edification, or moral instruction. It is the working out process through which something absolutely singular, something which expands the human sensorium in an unpredictable way, comes to be. Art educates or instructs only in a derivative sense.
Jack created a superb body of work over his more than thirty year career. He was an artist that was appreciated more by other artists than critics. I think this was because Jack’s work was very much about the process of painting and less about an obvious, politically resonant message. For me, it is a long meditation on mortality, embodiment, and what human being is at its very core. The layering-scraping process by which he fashioned his works were a metaphorical question: what can we take away from the representation of a human being and still see a human being? (Had critics more philosophical depth, they could have seen this in his work). I know it bothered him a great deal that his work was not more widely collected by the major Canadian museums.
From the standpoint of the quality of his work, he is without argument one of the giants of Canadian painting of the past forty years. I do not think there are many Toronto painters who would disagree. The critics (with the exception of the late John Bentley Mays, a long time champion of Jack’s work) disagreed. I could understand his frustration: people should pay more attention to my work too! But I would console us both with Krishna’s admonishment to Arjuna’s complaints in the Bhagavad Gita: You have the right to the work, not to the fruits: no one can predict how the work will be received, in other words, but we must perform it nonetheless.
Last year we were riding the Queen Street Car, heading to Parkdale to see a show. I remarked as we traveled west of Bathurst how much had changed since we lived together on Richmond Street. “We could wax nostalgic about every block,” he replied, resigned to the truth that things change. Why should our city of thirty years ago be today’s city?
The worst thing is not to die, but to have one’s life reduced to a set of dimly remembered facts and anecdotes. Life is the feeling, needing, self-realizing whole, not the particular things one did or experienced. And yet, I hope memory is not just nostalgia, and that honest reflection is the final completion of the whole which is a life: a last raising up of the person as this irreplaceable being that they have been, a celebration of their unrepeatable intervention into the indifferent order of things.
And yet, I hope memory is not just nostalgia, and that honest reflection is the final completion of the whole which is a life: a last raising up of the person as this irreplaceable being that they have been, a celebration of their unrepeatable intervention into the indifferent order of things.
Beautifully put, Jeff. With due credit it’s a summation I will hold close to my heart on many occasions in the coming years. I have reached that age when lovers, friends and comrades keep falling into the indifferent abyss.
Best wishes.
Thank you Tony. Sometimes the appropriate words just come from the world into our minds. I hope you are well and that we all rise to the challenge that this virus poses: a challenge not only to survive it, but then use the many failings it has exposed as motivation to change the world.
Jeff,
This is such a beautiful tribute to Jack. My heart breaks for you. I remember your”open-eyed childhood excitement” during your first year in Toronto and how infectious your enthusiasm was. I hope you are well.
Take care,
Mary Beth
Hi Mary Beth, Great to hear your voice drifting across the electronic ether. I hope you and Tony and your family are safe up in the hills and that this nightmare is over for everyone as soon as possible.
Thank for the beautiful eulogy. We are all so sad. As family we knew the young boy “”Jack” but you introduced us to the man and artist John Brown. I know you will miss him on a whole different level than the rest of us.
Please take care if yourself during this trying time and keep in touch.
What a beautifully written tribute to Jack. Jack and Joe were my other brothers growing up. Jack was kinder to me than my brothers were and often put up with my silly girl ways. He was a very introspective individual who lived many different lives throughout the years. Thanks for sharing this lovely perspective of your dear uncle with us.
Jeff,, I posted the following on Caroline Christie:s FB today about what you insghfullly wrote re: the passing of your uncle John (Jack) Brown. If I am in any way off track here let me know, the last thing I want is to upset you, Sincerely, Thom Sokoloski
Curiously, and I may be wrong here, but if my memory serves me well on my American History studies way back in my teens, John Brown’s Body also refers to the notion of a living ever evolving hymn which grew out of the military camp song tradition about a person and/or people’s culmanative energy/zeitgeist to commit and fight for their beliefs against all odds. In THAT case it was John Brown, the most radical US abolitionist prior to the American Civil War. In THIS case it was John Brown the radical artist who ‘gave himself over to working out the process through which something absolutely singular, something which expands the human sensorium in an unpredictable way, comes to be’. Thank you Jeff Noonan and thank you Caroline Christie for posting.
Thank you for this beautiful insight to Jack. To Jack’s family, siblings and extended family my condolences. May his memories soon fill the void his absents has made in your lives. As an older friend of his brother Mac, Jack and Joe were always around when we hung around the bank during our high school years. His shinning eyes, his laughter and energy were spontaneous even to those whose relationship was that of a younger brother. I find it hard to relate to all the years that have past since then, but the words that reflected his life relationship with a nephew has filled in the blank from then to now. Thank you for that, your words spoke volumes of Jack and his life.
I am the sister in Law of Joe Brown and sister to Lisa Coleman _Brown. I am so sorry to her of the passing of Jack Brown. Sending healing thoughts at this time. Wishing I could be of more support .
Thank you for sharing your memories, they have helped me hear his voice once again. My condolences on your loss. Jack was a wonderful person to have known. In sympathy, stephen
These are beautiful and inspiring reflections, Jeff. I met Jack (whom we called “Jake”) only once or twice, through Charlie Huisken. No one was more purely an artist than he, and by all accounts a wonderful fellow. I share your feelings of loss, which must be all the more painful in these days of isolation. (Will share your words on Twitter.)
Thank you for this astonishingly well expressed reflection and honouring of one of the finest humans I had the pleasure and privilege of knowing for over 3 decades…
Jack was for me a constant inspiration and your insightful and lucid words recall for me his fertile mind… you captured his spirit and I am so very grateful for this.
At the very least now I can visit the works of his works that adorn my walls at home and keep a glimpse of him …
Your words are of great comfort. I am deeply saddened by Jack’s passing. He was an inspirational figure in the art community. I will revisit his letter and book that he so generously sent me after visiting my painting studio. 🌹✡️♥️
Jeff, I posted the following on Caroline Christie:s FB today about what you insightfully wrote re: the passing of your uncle John (Jack) Brown. If I am in any way off track here let me know, the last thing I want is to upset you. I did not know your uncle but knew of him, saw him from afar but always felt his presence. I hope we can meet one day. Sincerely, Thom Sokoloski
Curiously, and I may be wrong here, but if my memory serves me well on my American History studies way back in my teens, John Brown’s Body also refers to the notion of a living ever evolving hymn which grew out of the military camp song tradition about a person and/or people’s culmanative energy/zeitgeist to commit and fight for their beliefs against all odds. In THAT case it was John Brown, the most radical US abolitionist prior to the American Civil War. In THIS case it was John Brown the radical artist who ‘gave himself over to working out the process through which something absolutely singular, something which expands the human sensorium in an unpredictable way, comes to be’. Thank you Jeff Noonan and thank you Caroline Christie for posting.
Hi Thom, not off base at all (I was actually just being a bit playful with my allusion, trying to lighten the dark a bit, but I love what you did with it: one puts an idea out there, and others develop it in perfect, but unforseen ways). Best. jeff
Jeff.. thanks so much for this response and your perspective. I signed up for your newsletters, and looking forward to follow your thoughts, and from what I can see read your books. I am presently reading Benjamin Fondane. A dynamic force in surrealism, as poet and philosopher. He was eventually taken to Auschwitz and gassed one week before the Russians arrived. I find the time he is talking about and the time we are living today, though different in nature (if I can say that), alludes to many issues we all face somewhat equally on a global level. He was also a colleague of Antonin Artaud whose Theatre and Its Double used the plague as a metaphor for theatre performance. So Fondane writes;
“AS EVERYONE knows, the title of this book (The Unhappy Consciousness) belongs to Hegel’s austere storehouse of weaponry— snatched from the most formidable of philosophical arsenals.[3]
In a time like ours, this title cannot fail to arouse in the reader the confused but tenacious idea of a reckoning with the current state of affairs, a state of affairs too obsessive and importunate for the mind to refuse to consider it and not be tempted to draw some sort of lesson from it. It is no mystery to anyone that our world—ideas, structures, economies, values—is at this moment waiting in line in front of the bankruptcy trustee’s office, and that man has never been under such insistent demands as he is today to find a way out within History and to link his fate to the passionate modification of the world as it now exists.”
We are both political beings, as citizens of social unhappiness, and metaphysical beings, as citizens of human unhappiness. Primum vivere deinde philosophari would be an excellent maxim if philosophy were just—much as it thinks it is—a formal science, dedicated to knowing first principles, promoting value criteria, and reflecting on what happened in the past. But insofar as it is (in Shestov, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard—to speak only of modern thinkers), rather than insofar as it knows, philosophy is something other than a inspector of weights and measures—or as philosophy puts it: of self-evident truths. Rather, philosophy is the very act by which the existent posits his own existence, the very act of the living being, seeking within and outside of himself, with or against self-evident truths, the very possibilities of living.”
Fondane, Benjamin. Existential Monday (New York Review Books Classics) (pp. 34-35). New York Review Books. Kindle Edition.
This may not be your perspective but it is where I am at in understanding this immediacy. All the best to you in these times.
thom
Hi Thom,
I don’t know his work in particular, but thanks for sharing, and it does resonate with some of my own work (which has always been an unstable mix of socialist optimism and existentialist (not exactly pessimism) clear sightedness about the ineradicable challenges of life as a mortal being. I try to bring about some sort of coherent synthesis in Embodiment and the Meaning of Life (which I wanted to call Frames of Finitude, but the publisher worried people would think it is about photography!). The present moment reminds us that what we really live on is collective labour, not capitalist markets, which offers hope, but also that this labour has become so mediate dby markets, and our desires and goals so bound up with careers and incomes that it is almost impossible to imagine how they can be practically untangled. Crises are turning points, and we need all the creative intelligence w can get not simply to re-start the world as it was, but to change it in line with what this moment of isolation reveals is most important: contact, conviviality, mutuality, and interconnection.
Jeff,
Thank you for this exquisitlely written and profoundly felt piece. I haven’t been able
to finish reading it yet as I’m too, too overcome, overwhelmed to reach the end. I’ll keep trying. I’d like to get in touch. My email: lonn.howard@gmail.com.
H
Hi Jeff. Thank You. Perfect truth and I am deeply sorry for your most profound loss. Caroline here for 5C. Yes you and Jack were on the cover of our most weird and wonderful LP TO SIR WITH HATE Keep in touch if you will. All today I was looking for the public obituary. I would like to talk.. if you have a chance. queenazar@gmail.com
Jeff, what a beautiful tribute you have written for your uncle. It was an exquisite reflection not only on the wonderful human being John was but the fact that he was one of Canada’s finest painters of our time. Knowing John and knowing his work enriched our lives.
Thank you for your sensitive and beautiful tribute. And by the way, perhaps you didn’t become a painter but you did become a beautiful writer.
Steve Smart
Such a touching tribute about John.
As a long time journey man/ women in the arts , I had the great pleasure of meeting John during one of his openings at Olga Koper’s Gallery – I was struck by his lovely , intelligent ,and sincere personality , not to mention, his wonderful compelling body of work; over the years , I looked forward to his seeing each new show at the gallery.
In my opinion , he was the best of Canadian painters.
I will miss the silence of his remarkable voice .
Linelle LeMoine