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Lot Essay
"'Alienation from people and their "ordinary" doings', Brown declared, 'has resulted in Art becoming an unforgivably dull subject.'
This last sentiment was also inscribed across the bottom of the The Little Sheep, the largest painting in the exhibition. Painted, doodled and drawn on a canvas which an earlier painting had been partially painted over, it had evolved, unplanned and unscripted, into its present condition of biomorphic shapes, pattern painting, cartoons and inscriptions. Part palimpsest, part collage (its one actual collage item is a newsprint version of 'Smash U.S Imperialism'), it is, in the radical juxtapositions of these polymorphous elements, true to the spirit of collage. Its title, deriving from yet another of its inscriptions, 'one by one the little sheep are coming home to roost' signified for Brown a feeling that, although still not fully resolved, the various aspects of his work were finally beginning to cohere in a way that he had not felt since the days of Imitation Realism." (R. Haese, 'On Being-in-the-world', Power to the People: The Art of Mike Brown, Melbourne, 1995, p. 69
This last sentiment was also inscribed across the bottom of the The Little Sheep, the largest painting in the exhibition. Painted, doodled and drawn on a canvas which an earlier painting had been partially painted over, it had evolved, unplanned and unscripted, into its present condition of biomorphic shapes, pattern painting, cartoons and inscriptions. Part palimpsest, part collage (its one actual collage item is a newsprint version of 'Smash U.S Imperialism'), it is, in the radical juxtapositions of these polymorphous elements, true to the spirit of collage. Its title, deriving from yet another of its inscriptions, 'one by one the little sheep are coming home to roost' signified for Brown a feeling that, although still not fully resolved, the various aspects of his work were finally beginning to cohere in a way that he had not felt since the days of Imitation Realism." (R. Haese, 'On Being-in-the-world', Power to the People: The Art of Mike Brown, Melbourne, 1995, p. 69