Blue Monet

NOTE: BLUE MONET is dual-projection 16mm. “[Carl Brown’s] documentaries of perception explode across the screen in colours that would make Disney blush, transforming even the simplest objects into teeming washes of longing and despair. Brown’s painterly vigils . . . mark him as a unique figure of the Canadian fringe.” – Mike Hoolboom “Brown is among the world’s major innovators in the experimental use of film chemistry, placing him among a small cabal of cinematic alchemists that includes Jürgen Reble and Phil Solomon. His works have typically been feature-length, and are marked by a cyclical editing style and remarkably intense, unusual surface colours and textures. In BLUE MONET, Brown’s latest film, presented on two screens simultaneously, he introduces a subtle and beautiful palette different from that seen in any of his previous work, particularly in its blues, violets, and indigos. Brown has long admired the paintings of Claude Monet, particularly his water lilies, and his film takes them as a touchstone, vividly rendering the relationship between process and object.” – Chris Gehman, Cinematheque Ontario Carl Brown: In my film work over the past twenty years water has always been a touchstone for my emotional state. To look out at the water, whether it be lake or sea, is to face the two endless zones, that of water and sky and the mysterious edge at which they meet. I find this vision one of the strongest intimations of infinity. Monet’s use of colour through water and sky to convey his emotional state has had a great influence on me. I have used my techniques of alchemical film to translate onto film my impressions of Monet’s sense of colour, water, sky and his most powerful icon the water lily. Using my toning, liquid emulsion, reticulation, dried crystal bleach formations and stacking techniques, to just name a few, I have translated the Monet experience onto the surface of my film. This is an homage to Claude Monet and Eustace R. Brown who both taught me to “cultivate my garden.” An illustrational form tells you through its intelligence immediately what the form is about, wheras a nonillustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into fact. Alchemical work provides both illustration and nonillustration simultaneously…the experiential depth of representation (the photographic source), and a sensuous (abstract) surface of the wild, both seen and unseen…but felt. That is what is art creation; a union between the beauty that is Monet converted through my alchemical nature into a new form for a new generation of viewers.