Kathan Brown

"As John Cage said,'Our lives are changing to the point where people may have their own lives rather than lives that society has given them second-hand.' Art is in the forefront of changes in society, and artists are the best people we can ask about ways to take hold of our own lives by thinking creatively."
-Kathan Brown

Kathan Brown, the founder of San Francisco's Crown Point Press, has an important book out - "Magical Secrets about Thinking Creatively: The Art of Etching and the Truth of show more Life". The book is put together as a series of thirteen creative secrets gathered from working with contemporary artists as they created etchings at Crown Point.

Wayne Thiebaud's corresponding creative secret is to cultivate sensuality. Richard Diebenkorn's is getting into the flow. Shazia Sikander's is to use every tool. Robert Bechtle's key is to know what you don't want. And provocatively, John Cage's work hinges on letting chance take a role in the process by not knowing what you want.

Kathan writes clearly about the process of creation, the decisions involved, and the benefits of collaboration. The mix of artistic styles among the artists discussed is refreshing and inspiring. A colleague of Dorothy Napangardi, an Aboriginal artist from Australia, provides a comment on art that resonates deeply:
"I am not painting just for my pleasure. There is meaning, knowledge and power."

A website - "Magical Secrets" - has been developed to go along with the book: http://www.magical-secrets.com show less

For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they will adore. Cage, in his music, tried many things, but some are key -- accident, sound for sound's sake and a Zen approach. Once, he accepted a definition of the purpose of music as being "to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences".

The same approaches characterize his visual work, as this book illustrates. The writer, Kathan Brown, is uniquely qualified to discuss Cage and his work. show more Brown founded the Crown Point Press, which published Cage's work, and where he made some of his prints. She knew him, and understood his art and his process.

The book is NOT entirely about Cage's visual work. The first part is a text on Cage's art (and on art generally) by author Kathan Brown. The second uses Cage's scores to show how he used accident in his music. The third presents some of Cage's visual works. The book is a treasure and a treasury -- for those who like this sort of art.
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I read Brown's book while taking a printing class. It helped me to understand the process and increased my interest in viewing prints of all kinds.