Artist Information
Artist
Patrick George Cowley-Brown (1918-2007)Role
PainterDate made
1941Time Period
20th CenturyNotes
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Born in Singapore, Patrick George Cowley-Brown was an Official Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) Artist, painter, printmaker and commercial artist. His media included oil, watercolour, tempera, pen and ink, charcoal, Conté crayon and photo offset printmaking. Cowley-Brown immigrated to Canada in 1926 with his family. He studied under Frederick Varley (1881-1969) at the Vancouver School of Applied Art and Design, followed by studies at the H. Faulkner Smith School of Fine & Applied Art, where he won two scholarships. At one point he shared a studio with artist Paul Goranson (1911-2002).
Cowley-Brown was teaching when World War II began, and he enlisted in the RCAF (flight-lieutenant), training as a wireless gunner. After a brief posting in England, he worked at Rockliffe Air Base near downtown Ottawa from 1942 to 1944 where he drew daily life, all on paper. Cowley-Brown won 1st prize in the 1944 RCAF art competition, and he became an Official War Artist that same year. The Western and Northwestern Air Command was his subject area. He painted authoritative depictions of Canada's West Coast air stations, operations, activities and installations, as well as portraits of servicemen, genre scenes of military life (on and off bases), warplanes, military equipment, boats, and the landscapes and sites of the surrounding country, as well as the construction of the Alaska Highway. These paintings, mostly oil on board or canvas, were preliminary field sketches, to be later completed in the studio. His styles were Fauvism and Realism. After the war his subjects included marine scenes and landscapes. He left the RCAF in 1946.
Cowley-Brown exhibited widely, with the B.C. Society of Fine Arts in their 39th Annual Exhibition and at the B.C. Graphic exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1949. He also exhibited with the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (1950), the Canadian Society of Graphic Art (1951), and the Canadian Group of Painters (1951-), a collective of 28 painters from across the country that succeeded the disbanded Canadian Group of Seven in 1933. He had solo exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery (1947) and at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (1950). His works were included in group exhibitions “Canadian Artists of the Second World War”, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Ontario (1981), “Printmaking in British Columbia, 1889 – 1983”, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (1983) and in “Vancouver: Art and Artists 1931–1983", Vancouver Art Gallery (1983).
Cowley-Brown moved back to Ottawa in 1951, where he worked as a graphic designer for the Canadian Government for 27 years, then retiring to work full-time as an artist. His works are held in the permanent collections of many institutions such as the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the Canadian War Museum which holds some 160 of his works.
