Touch It All

E Brown

Interview by C. VanWinkle

September 28, 2022

Can you please start by describing the prompt that you responded to?

It was a possibly ceramic birthday cake with kind of like pastel primary colors. And instead of candles, there were fingers coming up from the frosting and curling over the edges of the cake. I was really excited to open it. It was something that I hadn’t thought to expect at all.

I think it really captured the pressure of birthdays, wanting to start the new year right. There was something so creepy about it, but I really liked it. It was also really celebratory and got me thinking about hands a lot. I thought a lot about the colors and why those colors were chosen. It was very whimsical and there was also something so foreboding about it.

That's a fun combination. How did you get started?

I knew I wanted to work in block print, but I also played with the idea of doing a collage background. So I went through all of my collage materials and cut out a bunch of hands. I found these hands of butlers holding trays, but when you flip the hands upside-down, they look like they’re crawling around. At first, I wanted to do something with those, but I also really wanted to lean into the palmistry aspect of it because I thought that really related to the birthday idea: the celebratory piece and the identity piece. So I ended up taking that route. But the very first thing I did was go through every magazine I own and cut out hands. [laughs]

From there, I sketched out the hand and then carved a block print on rubber out of it. It's just a blank hand. I wanted the lines to be really clean and kind of sparse. I had drawn all the symbols on it, but I decided that, instead of carving them, I wanted to hand-paint them on the actual piece and have the hand be blank. Not only was it faster than trying to carve individual symbols, but I also liked how messy they looked once they were on the hand.

How does this piece relate to the rest of your work?

I've been working a lot with block printing and love this esoteric, spiritual kind of imagery. In the past, I’ve focused more on words. I write a lot of music and poetry, and I've been creating these banners that have cryptic sayings on them. That’s been really fun, but with this piece, I wanted to challenge myself to show more than tell. That was something that I played around a lot with. It’s very reminiscent of other art that I make using a lot of symbols but had way fewer words than I usually work with.

I struggle with that as well. I’m trying to learn to show rather than tell.

I think I got somewhere with this one. It's still feels like I layered it on a little thick, but I do like how it came out.

Do you read palms? Are you familiar with palmistry?

I am much more familiar with astrology than palmistry. I've been studying astrology since I was in middle school. So, for a while now. I know that they're related. Lately, I’ve been really interested in palmistry, and have been looking at a lot of hand maps, but I don't actually know anything about it.

Beyond those two, are there other forms of divination that you're especially familiar with? Do you read tea leaves or coffee grounds?

I know a little bit about those but I wouldn't say I'm an expert. I use Tarot as a main tool and different oracle cards. I also have my own little collection of sigils or symbols that I use for personal divination.

I have a tarot deck that I don't know what to do with, but I bought it because it's beautiful.

They're so beautiful! And they're all a little different, which is cool.

Absolutely. Was it important to you to integrate the prompt into what you made, or not really?

A little bit. It doesn't translate well in pictures, but the colors in my piece are the same primary colors that I saw in the birthday cake, but toned really dark. The lines of the hands are that really dark, rich brown that the cake fingers were, and the blues and yellows and pinks of the original are the blue and gold and the kind of bloody red of the symbols. So I did think about it. And I wanted the flames coming off of the fingers to be like little birthday candles.

One thing that struck me about your piece is the texture. The background has a texture, and you can see the outline where the cuts were, and I think that's exciting. Do you often include textures in your work? Are you into a tactile experience?

Yes, I love texture! I’m so glad you asked about that. Right before I emailed it to you, it was just on a white background, and I was like, “Oh man, this is so boring.” [laughs] So I just cut the hand out, used my ink roller to add some really thin layers of that blue, and then did a circle of the gold. I generally work on fabric more than paper because I really love the way that things print on fabric. I love frayed edges along the sides of my art. It was fun to try to capture some of those same feelings on paper.

What else can you learn from people's hands?

We all do so much with our hands! I've always been very drawn to hands in my art. I know I've done a lot of collaging around hands, and drawing hands. I think everybody's hands look so different, and you can really learn so much about people from their hands. I think I spend a lot of time thinking about my hands and what they say about me.

What do yours say about you?

I have tattoos on one hand, all these very small symbols. And I think it's pretty clear that I work with my hands a lot and have been doing manual labor for a long time. I have calluses on my fingers from playing guitar and I have one long callous along my pointer finger from twisting the tops of beets off. Just funny things like that can tell such a story.

What about birthdays? Are birthdays important to you? Is your birthday important to you?

I think astrologically birthdays are very important. I love knowing people's birth charts and being able to tackle such a web. And I think birthdays as a celebration are important. I've been trying to learn how to put less pressure on your birthday being the start of something new. But it's also so nice to have timeframes that are new and be able to separate your experiences and that way.

It's interesting to think that we are all at different points in our own storyline like that. I like finding these ordinary experiences that make us think these profound thoughts about time.

Yeah, and how we relate to each other. I've been learning a lot about astrology, and there's this theory called profection years. It's basically New Year based on your birthday, where in each new year of your life, you’re ruled by a new house in your birth chart. I've been paying attention to it for the last three years or so, and it's been really incredible to see the themes that play out astrologically, based on which house in my chart I'm ruled by that year. So that piece of birthdays I pay a lot of attention to now.

That sounds a little like how Chinese astrology works. That's pretty cool. Now that you have successfully participated, what would be your advice for someone else new to this project?

I would also say this to myself if I did it again. Think less about the next person in line, how someone will respond to your art and what they'll make based off of it. I remember the surprise and excitement of seeing the birthday cake and thinking, “Well, I'm not gonna make that!”

You have no idea what that person was responding to.

Yeah! So I would say to not think of the next artist in line and just think of yourself. There's so much to explore and change about the way you work in this little moment, and I think that was the most fun part.

Call Number: C81VA | C84VA.broTo

E Brown is a farmer living on the northshore of Massachusetts where they were born and raised. They focus most of their art on music, block printing, and poetry.