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Realist artist Colleen
Browning found inspiration for her paintings in her everyday
world and in her travels to exotic locations. The circus town of
Baraboo, Wisconsin, inspired one of her most impressive series of
paintings, which features the circus, pageants, clowns, and
marching bands. Picture of a Painting of the Great Circus
Parade, 1988, is a study of illusion, fragmented
and combined mirrors of reality.
Of Celtic ancestry
who owned a family manor in Fermoy, County Cork,
Browning was born in a British military base in southeastern
England in 1918. Her paternal grandfather served the crown
during the Raj in India and her father, Major General Langley
Browning played a significant role in Rome after the collapse of
Italy during WWII. A child prodigy, she was a stellar art student
gaining acceptance in national art exhibits while still a
teenager. Winner of the Edwin Austin Abbey Memorial International
Scholarship, she attended London's Slade
School of the Arts earning her diploma with distinction in 1939. Her first solo exhibition was
presented at London's
Little Gallery in the Piccadilly Arcade. Arriving in New York on
H.M.S. Queen Elizabeth in 1949, this academically trained artist
in Renaissance methods found herself amidst the dramatically
shifting currents of the Greenwich Village art scene shifting its
rudder toward modernist abstractionism. Adapting her tightly
rendered figurative imagery toward the social and magic realist
themes she observed in her new country, Browning experienced early
astonishing success. By 1952 she was achieving critical
praise in Time, Newsweek, and the national art press. Appearing
among the most prestigious museum and gallery shows, Browning was
firmly ensconced into the Realist movement appearing at the
Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial, the Carnegie
International, Chicago Art Institute, the Legion of Honor of San
Francisco, and the National Academy of
Design. She was elected as a full Academician to the National
Academy in 1966. Gracefully she remained an undaunted, always
evolving, representational painter until death in New York City in
2003.
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