Frederick J. Brown has been a passionately expressive painter for over 30 years. Throughout his career this extremely prolific artist was inspired and compelled to paint on a wide range of subjects and themes. The exhibition, Frederick J. Brown: Portraits of Music I Love contains compositions selected from his Jazz and Blues series. Early in Brown's career while living in New York City, a health crisis forced him to ultimately rethink his artistic priorities and commit a significant portion of his energies to documenting jazz and blues musicians. The artistic community of Brown's early years included working and living with musicians like Ornette Coleman and Anthony Braxton. They impressed upon him the importance of strong daily work ethic. It was not until years later that he discovered that it was the musicians and artists from that community of intellectual geniuses who paid his hospital bills, thus saving his life--a debt he had to repay.

Brown was born in Greensboro, Georgia in 1945 and was raised by working class parents in Chicago's South Side communities. It was there that he became familiar with the Chicago jazz and blues culture that was, in part, an outgrowth of the strong spiritual traditions of the Black Church and the African's musical response to life in America. In college he trained as an architect, but later switched to fine arts. By the time he arrived in New York in 1970, he had developed a very sophisticated knowledge of art history with a specific passion for German Expressionism and American Abstract Expressionism. In 1975, Brown met the renowned modernist painter Willem de Kooning who urged him to make painting a "sacred calling." Brown is clear about his origins and influences and describes how, "I was always in love with Abstract Expressionism...Abstract Expressionism was a very beautiful, lyrical language.... Also, I had always been fascinated with that type of surface because my mother was a baker and I used to like to watch her frost cakes and things."

Portraits of Music I Love is comprised of over-sized portraits, one abstract composition, and two small paintings of a trumpet and a banjo. The defining elements of Brown's paintings can all be found in the fundamental dynamics of jazz and blues idioms-rhythm, improvisation, call and response. The debt Brown must repay to the musicians who saved his life is his "response" to their "call" to live and make art. The rhythm is the repetition of daily practice and work-improvisation comes with every challenge the painter encounters each time he faces an empty canvas.