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"In 2010, the Berkeley, California\u2013based artist Christopher Brown completed a large painting called A Short Story. It&amp;#039;s a scene that might be drawn from his childhood in Ohio: A boy in a red coat jumps down a snowy hillside while his friends watch from what appears to be a school parking lot; a tiny portrait attached to the side of the canvas shows the cropped face of a woman, possibly the boy&amp;#039;s mother.  The painting didn&amp;#039;t look like this at first, though. The catalogue of the gallery show where A Short Story made its debut reproduces some stages of the painting&amp;#039;s progress, and each is substantially different from its predecessor. In the earliest version, identically dressed adults stand in rows outside a long, green building. Over the course of many layers of paint, the building is transformed into a stand of trees; a red bus enters the picture and turns green; the rows of adults change into a crowd of schoolchildren; the jumping boy appears; two women&amp;#039;s faces poke out of circles and then vanish. At last, the picture achieves its final state. The process is a little like the parlor game Telephone, where a whispered sentence is passed from person to person until it becomes a different sentence altogether\u2014but it&amp;#039;s hardly random.  Click here to see the gallery for &amp;quot;Art Show: Christopher Brown.&amp;quot;   The trick is knowing when to stop. &amp;quot;Sometimes I&amp;#039;ll look at my paintings and think, I can&amp;#039;t believe I left it like that,&amp;quot; Brown says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve actually sold paintings and afterward asked the buyers if I could rework them a little bit. And then some people weren&amp;#039;t happy with them, so I had to buy the paintings back. It&amp;#039;s nuts. I&amp;#039;ve got to get myself to shut up.&amp;quot;  Brown studied painting at the University of California, Davis, in the 1970s. Wayne Thiebaud and William T. Wiley, who formed part of an informal Bay Area group of artists, were his professors and mentors. In the spirit of Thiebaud&amp;#039;s paintings of rows of cakes and ice cream sundaes, Brown&amp;#039;s paintings often contain multiples. In the late 1980s and early &amp;#039;90s, he created a series of blurry, ethereal images inspired by an early photograph of Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address. Brown painted the men on the margins standing in irregular clusters, listening or waiting; out of the context of the original photo, the men look like lost shades. Other paintings by Brown have imagined patterns of skiers on a hillside, marching bands, or swimmers&amp;#039; heads bobbing on the surface of water.  Click here to see the gallery for &amp;quot;Art Show: Christopher Brown.&amp;quot;   These figures are rendered in strong, bright colors and with an absence of fine detail, as though seen through gauze. &amp;quot;Christopher paints the way he lives,&amp;quot; says Sharon Twigg-Smith, a former corporate curator in Honolulu who collects Brown&amp;#039;s work. &amp;quot;He distills his life down to the basics, and he does the same with his painting. He strips away the nonessential. It&amp;#039;s definitely figurative, but it&amp;#039;s not realism.&amp;quot; If the conflict between order and disorder has been a consistent theme in his work, lately incongruous elements have crept in. A Short Story is one of a number of recent paintings in which detached faces or objects float across the scene; sometimes miniature pictures open up within the larger picture. &amp;quot;We try to form ordered patterns that give our lives structure and meaning,&amp;quot; Brown explains. &amp;quot;But we also have a rebellious side that wants to find the specificity and idiosyncrasy that give our lives richness. Painting is about that, too. Ideas come to you that are somehow outside the normal thread of things. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s mysterious to me,&amp;quot; he continues. &amp;quot;Sometimes I think painting is just a kind of conscious dreaming.&amp;quot; Click here to see the gallery for &amp;quot;Art Show: Christopher Brown.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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