The Room, Part 1

A low-heeled leg tossed over the side of an armchair and a painting of ancient Chinese figures are all that occupy a grey and anonymous space. The sparseness of The Room (Part I) is at once compelling and perplexing. Joan Brown, a San Francisco Bay–area painter best known for her large self-portraits, insisted that the disparate elements of her compositions were purposeful: “I am very concerned that whatever elements are used have meaning and content; not just a good-looking image or an interesting image or a bad-looking image. I’m concerned that the images aren’t egocentric but also universal.”

The leg of the obscured figure likely belongs to the artist because Brown’s yellow shoes are a motif in her self-portraits. However, by denying the viewer her face or full figure, the artist asserts a confident sense of introspection and self-reflection. Indeed, her work of the mid-1970s marks a transition in her practice as she began to research non-Western cultures and religions in a personal quest for spiritual enlightenment. The painting in Brown’s scene depicts a group of Chinese Kazakhs and their hunting eagles against the backdrop of a windswept landscape of western Mongolia.