Jonathon Brown

Born in Edinburgh in 1955, Jonathon Brown is a Scottish artist who for quarter of a century has made his home in the foot-hills of the Alps north of Nice. He attended The Edinburgh Academy, going on to read Moral Sciences at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Thereafter he was mainly devoted to writing and indeed during the 1980s contributed regularly to the Commentary page of the Times Literary Supplement, as well as being Arts Editor on What’s On Scotland and Opera Correspondent for Scotland on Sunday. However, encouraged by David Hockney, whom he had met in the late 1970s, Jonathon’s creative self as a visual artist also emerged during the 1980s. Upon arrival in France in 1992 he devoted himself most to his art, a vision that was celebrated by the Talbot Rice Art Gallery at Edinburgh University in a show entitled RoadMovies [2002] and more recently in two residencies at the Musée International d’Art Naïf, in Nice [2010, 2015].
Despite life as an artist he has over the years written regularly for the culture pages of the European Commission’s website, BBC Music Magazine, and for Piano International, as well as broadcasting some quirky interval talks for BBC Radio Three, including A History of the Squiggle. Jonathon’s books include, most notably, his memoir of friendship with Hockney, entitled I Don’t Know Much About Art But I Know David Hockney [Mer, 2007] and Cook-au-Vin, a book of recipes & drawings [BPE, 2012] – for which Hockney supplied the cover image. This was followed by a book of dates and photography, Bottoms up, Borodino! [BPE, 2013]. The publisher “BPE” is Jonathon’s own imprint, Brown Paper Editions, which in 2014 also began a series of volumes of other artists’ work – the first of which is Youdi – en ligne and in 2015 a series of other people’s reminiscences prompted by photographs, which Jonathon tapes, edits and designs into a book. Jonathon is also an accomplished book designer, of all of his own and some other volumes. He is presently working on a jaunty volume about the philosophy of vision concentrating on Renaissance Florence, and a volume about the moral dynamics of Wagner’s Tristan and Parsifal.