Christopher Brown valuation

Christopher Brown was born at Camp Lejeune, a Marine Corps base in North Carolina, in 1951 and grew up in Ohio and Illinois. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1973 and took his MFA in 1976 at the University of California, Davis, where his teachers included Wayne Thiebaud, William T. Wiley and Roy De Forest. From 1981 to 1994 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, chairing the department from 1990. His paintings set figures against abstract grounds and repeating patterns, often painted from memory and sometimes from historical photographs. He began etching in 1980, took up woodcut in 1986 and lithography in 1990, and from 1991 made colour soft ground etchings and aquatints at Crown Point Press, among them Seventy-Nine Men, Station and the set Five Studies from an Endless Film; from 1996 he also made etchings with Paulson Fontaine Press. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth organised his touring exhibition History and Memory in 1995, and his work is in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He lives and works in Berkeley.

Besides paintings he has made pastels and other works on paper, and many etchings, aquatints, woodcuts and lithographs; Crown Point Press and Paulson Fontaine Press published many of the etchings. For a print, a buyer will want the edition number, the signature, the publisher and the paper, and will look for fading, foxing or trimmed margins. For a painting, a gallery invoice and the date of the work should go with it.