From her home on the edge of Queen Creek, nestled on three acres between Arizona’s San Tan mountains, Naomi Brown can look out the window and enjoy unobstructed views of her most beloved subject—the Southwest desert.
Born and raised in Twenty Nine Palms, California, her love of the desert knows no beginning or end and it shows in the paintings of the Mojave desert of her youth, and the Sonoran, where she has lived for 15 years.
“People always say the desert is so ugly and that there’s nothing to it,” Brown says. “But they don’t slow down enough to actually get a sense of it—the extremeness of it and the delicateness of it, the animals and the vegetation. It has some of the most beautiful colors in the morning and evening…You just have to take the time to see it.”
Organ Pipe Sunset, oil on canvas, 50 x 50”
Brown is extremely intimate with both regions and has a heightened awareness of the differences between them, both the obvious and the subtle nuances. Rather than the Joshua trees so prevalent in the Mojave, now she’s surrounded by saguaro cacti, muddy clay instead of granular sand and its distinct world of flora and fauna.
“I call it a frilly desert,” she says. “Compared to the Mojave, there are a lot of pretty layers. Right now it looks like a jungle—it’s very green.”
Her ability to see the desert in all its changing glory is illuminated in her vibrant Western landscapes often featuring backlit cacti reaching toward a creamsicle color-streaked sky. “Those are the things that are in my heart,” she says. “I know the different blues in the sky—the sunsets change with the season—sometimes they’re more intense than others. In the Mojave, the winds blow all day long and I see more purple in the sand there. All of those factors create a very different atmosphere for a painting, so it has a great effect on my work.”
Santa Fe Evening, oil on canvas, 48 x 72”
To capture her vistas, Brown says she is “breaking the rules” by applying both oils and acrylics to the same canvas, which gives these pieces a crisp, contemporary edge, while her purely oil paintings are softer.
She uses acrylic to establish the gradient of color in her backgrounds and uses oil over top for texture and depth. “It goes on like makeup,” she says of the acrylic. “It’s a good start for the clouds to come in, then I use a spray varnish and it all meshes together.”
Admittedly, Brown, like most people, loves the romantic beauty of sunrises and sunsets, but she’s spending more time exploring mid-day scenes when the colors are more washed out and natural. While she is decidedly a “desert landscape artist,” she also loves painting the Navajo people.
Saguaro Moon, oil and acrylic, 30 x 40”
For Brown, it has been a journey of learning and overcoming technical challenges since she started teaching herself to paint 20 years ago. She began with watercolors before graduating to acrylics and then oils. She surmounted her struggle depicting clouds—“one day it just clicked”—and now they are her favorite subject to paint. Today, she’s striving to perfect the saguaro, a subject she finds much more difficult to render than the familiar Joshua tree, due to its cylindrical shape and more geometrical design.
“I’m learning all the time,” she says. “You have to keep learning and reinventing yourself or your art gets stagnant. There are endless techniques to explore.” —
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