Artist Talk: The Energy Theory of Color with Matt Brown and Professor Ming Meng Ph.d.

About the Talk:

Printmaker Matt Brown and Professor of Psychology Ming Meng will engage in a Zoom dialogue describing their ongoing work exploring an invented color theory.  The idea arose from dialogues between the two of them beginning in 2018.  Prof. Ming, a specialist in the science of visual perception, holds a PhD from Princeton Univ.(2006), has taught at MIT (2005 – 09) and Dartmouth College (2009 – 17), and currently teaches at South China Normal University in Guangzhou, China.  Matt Brown is a graduate of Harvard University (BA, 1981), has earned his living making woodblock prints since 1995, and has taught classes in woodblock printmaking at the Concord Art Association since 2008. It is the Dartmouth connection that brought the two of them together. Prof. Meng and his family stayed in Matt’s house in nearby Lyme, NH during several winter visits and became Covid refugees there for a 6-month stretch in 2020.  Their dialogues represent a meet-up of the differing outlooks of scientist and artist seeking to describe how we see and think visually.  They share a common interest in building a new, workable image of how we see, how we interact with color, and especially how (and why) we enjoy making and looking at art.

About Matt Brown:

Bio:

1958: Born in Boston, Mass
1981: Graduated magna cum laude, Harvard College.
1981-1995: worked as carpenter, cabinet-maker, and builder.
1993: Begin making color prints using Japanese methods.
1995: Began making prints full-time. Became state-juried member of the League of NH Craftsmen.
1995 to present: Matt has been selling my prints at various galleries mostly in N.E.

In November, 2017, Matt took over an existing art and craft gallery in my home town of Lyme, re-naming and re-working it as Matt Brown Fine Art (mbrownfa.com).

Statement:

I make color woodblock prints using the Japanese hanga method.  My imagery is mostly of New England landscapes, with an emphasis on NH and VT lakes and mountains and the Maine coast.

I love the process of making these prints: the way pictorial simplicity is encouraged, the way an image is separated into parts and put back together, the way the translucent colors blend and juxtapose, the way the wood interacts with the paper.

I love the look of these prints: the clean carved edges juxtaposed with the soft look of the colors.

In conjunction with his Artist Talk, Matt Brown will be teaching at Concord Art this Spring! Join Matt for a One-Day Introduction in Japanese Wood Block Printing.

Learn More + Register

About Professor of Psychology Ming Meng:

Ming Meng, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, received his PhD from Princeton University, was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and a faculty member at Dartmouth College. As documented in several high-impact peer-reviewed publications, he has been capable of decoding what neural mechanisms underlie visual cognition and attention, with and without visual awareness. These neural mechanisms correlate with activity in broad visual processing network and attentional neural network across brain regions in the left and right occipital, temporal and parietal lobes, shedding lights for the understanding of normal behavioral patterns as well as neurological disorders. Professor Meng is an expert of behavioral experimentation, functional brain imaging, machine learning and computational modeling. He was a Principle Investigator (PI) of grants by the National Science Foundation (NSF), a recipient of the Young Investigator Award by the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. He was a member of the prestigious Gifted Young Program at the University of Science and Technology of China. He is currently a full professor at the South China Normal University.