Provenance:

Phyllis Kind Gallery.

Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1982.

Lot Note:

By 1981, Roger Brown had begun dividing his time between Chicago and New Buffalo, Michigan, where he was constructing a lakeside studio on the dunes overlooking Lake Michigan—a vantage point that sharpened his attention to the region's shifting weather and light. Michigan Color Watch distills that close observation into Brown's distinct graphic idiom: a band of dense, scalloped storm clouds, rendered in the interlocking, quilt-like pattern that recurs throughout his skyscapes, presses down over a foreground screen of flattened black silhouettes—sumac fronds, seed heads, and cattails—through which a narrow strip of turquoise water is just visible. A spider and a scattering of insects, picked out in fine detail among the foliage, animate the composition's near-heraldic stillness.

As the critic Robert Storr observed of Brown's work, the artist had a gift for making his darker fixations "snappy, mesmerizing, bleakly hilarious and indelible" (R. Storr, "Message and Murmurs from the (Broken) Heartland," in Roger Brown: The American Landscape, exh. cat., DC Moore Gallery, New York, 2008). That tension is indeed fully present here: a sky heavy with implied menace, rendered with the crisp, decorative control of folk art and comic-strip line. The painting's title points to Brown's daily ritual of tracking atmospheric change—translating direct observation of a specific place into an image that is both documentary and highly stylized. Thus, it marks Brown's singular position among the Chicago Imagists, bridging vernacular American subject matter with a disciplined, near-abstract sense of pattern and design.

Framed: 43 3/4 x 66 3/4 x 3 1/2 in.

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