About the museum

The Museum of Calligraphy has its start in the love of a single artist for a specific type of work…it celebrates this artist in several permanent portfolios, and wishes that these projects will serve as invitations for others to join…to coalesce…to become a kind of accumulator and assembler of a dream-team of creative dreamers. 

About the portfolio

Norton.  My childhood.  California.  Swallows nest in the eves of the garage.  Father mowing the lawn with a push mower.  Mom.  Trips to museums.  Wild rice and pheasant.  Trout.  Portraits on a bail of hay.  The Odyssey.  And the return.  Post-Taiwan.  39.  Desperate.  Underemployed.  Rebuilding.  The first project in the Norton Studio has alternated between titles:  Reborn and Jumping through Hoops.  In either case, it is about the emergence of the being fully grown.  The birth we give to ourselves when we are ready.  Three rusted hoops from a wine barrel are shot through by the handle of a long broom and suspended over the backs of the family dining-room chairs.  The paper is formed in a torus or a tunnel and I make my way through…a personal Lascaux?  A self-created birthing channel?  All time is the gestation of the instant.  And each album in this portfolio is about discovery…I’ll address just one more here: Pole Vaulting.  It’s me.  In high school.  Terrible form.  Questionable hair.  Awkward on all levels.  And yet, it was a kind of metaphor for the power of the brush/pole…the power that creativity in general and brush-work calligraphy in particular would have for me.  You see, the brush and its contact creates the fulcrum about which we hurl ourselves defiantly into the air, countering gravity, leaving home, daring… 

About the artist

Kevin Brown is a product of the Pacific—having lived in Southern California, Japan and Taiwan, the center of his sojourning has been the big blue heart of the ocean.  Calligraphy, being an art of water as much of an art of paper, is the natural bridge connecting someone so Western and so Eastern simultaneously.  Odysseus made his way far, far out.  So too did an old man.  Many voyagers cross great distances of water only to have revealed the secret contents of an inner journey and a quest object they didn’t know they needed.  For Kevin, it was an ink practice.