Christopher Brown was born in 1951 in Camp Lejeune, a Marine Corps base in North Carolina, where his father, Bruce, was a doctor. When he was three, his family moved to Ohio, and his interest in art began to bud. He had his mother to enroll him in Saturday morning art classes in a neighbor's home; an interest in art is among Brown's earliest memories. Painting for Brown continues to be connected with the formation and sensation of memory; that moment in his childhood during the move to Ohio, when harmony was disrupted just as his conceptualization of the world began. When Brown was 13, his family moved again, this time to Illinois. His father became the student-health director at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, where Brown attended college and majored in painting. After he graduated in 1973, he went to art school at the University of California at Davis. The faculty included Thiebaud, Wiley, Roy De Forest, Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri and Roland Peterson. At Davis, Brown began to think seriously about the concept of Pop Art in Great Britain as well as in America. To Brown, this concept meant both the presence-absence of the media image, the tension between its immediacy and yet its distance from us and from the reality to which it refers. After the first year at Davis, he took a year off and went to Europe on a grant from the University of Illinois. He spent several months in Spain, visiting the Prado, settling briefly in Malaga. Brown then went to Munich, where he spent most of the winter. Brown returned to Davis, where he graduated in 1976. After his graduation Brown spent five years on the move. First he moved to Woodland, an old farming community outside of Davis, where he taught part-time at American River College in Sacramento. Then in 1978, he moved to San Francisco, where he not only painted but also wrote art criticism for Artweek magazine in Oakland. Then, with a DAAD (Deutsches Akademisches Austausch Dienst) Fellowship awarded through the Fulbright Program, he went back to Munich for a year. He returned to San Francisco after being awarded the second of his two art critic's grants by the National Endowment for the Arts and went on to teach in the studio art department of the University of California at Berkeley in 1981 where he taught until 1994, and was Department Chair from 1990-1994. Brown currently lives and works in Berkeley, California.
