Naomi Brown | Desert Drama

Painter Naomi Brown is captivated by the brilliant colors of the Southwest’s golden hour.

By Bonnie Gangelhoff

Artists call it the golden hour—the awe-inspiring moments just after sunrise and just before sunset when the sky blazes with radiant light and brilliant colors. For centuries painters have rushed to capture the signature glow that occurs when the sun sits low on the horizon.

These are also the times of day when Arizona landscape artist Naomi Brown may settle into a comfy sofa on her back porch with a camera nearby or to her eye. She’s ever ready to chronicle the saturated peaches, violets and hot pinks of the Sonoran Desert sky. “I am lucky enough to have nothing blocking my view,” Brown says. “I just see wide-open desert with beautiful, mature saguaros and cholla cactuses that seem to go on forever. This is where I find my peace and inspiration for my artwork.”

Her recent painting, ARIZONA SPLENDOR, offers an example of the view from her home nestled in the San Tan Mountains 45 minutes southeast of Phoenix. The artwork captures the towering, majestic saguaros that punctuate the landscape, creating a gallery of living sculpture that sprawls for miles toward the Superstition Mountains. The Sonoran Desert is the only place in the world where the famous cactuses grow wild, and, at maturity, they can stretch to more than 40-feet tall.

ARIZONA SPLENDOR is also a quintessential Brown artwork that reflects her ability to capture the high drama of the desert terrain. In this painting and in many of her other desertscapes, one element plays a starring role: color. One of the artist’s key missions is to portray the “romantic hues” of the golden hour, with a particular focus on the day’s end. For Brown, the transition from day to night tells the visual, poetic story of desert life. “It’s as if the desert is showing off its beauty after a long, hot day,” she says. “The desert can be a harsh environment. I like to look at late in the day colors as a gift the desert gives back every evening. I love being able to capture the beauty of these gifts.”

Brown considers her work a melding of a contemporary style with realism. Others have described it as a marriage between the painterly and the hyperrealistic. Still, sometimes, when she pushes the envelope using an oversaturated color palette, her desertscapes verge on the surreal. Her pumped-up palette in works like OASIS OF MARA MORNING helps convey the dreamlike nature of the parched, desolate terrain.

Tim Geary, director of The Signature Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, agrees, saying Brown has a “profound talent” for depicting the desert’s mystical aura. “Naomi has a keen eye for light and color,” he notes. “In her studio, you can find the deliberations in color theory mixed onto her palette. She channels her intuition and appreciation for the desert into bold hues that are balanced against the neutral tones found in the landscape. The result yields a true testament to the time and attention she puts into each piece, but also her natural gift for portraying the otherworldly beauty of the West.”

Brown’s passion for the desert began in childhood. Born in Palm Desert, California, in 1975, she grew up in nearby Twentynine Palms, a town tucked into the Mojave Desert. The Joshua Tree National Park was a few minutes from her back door. Early on the Mojave became her playground, its flora and fauna, her friends. She hiked, chased lizards, climbed rocks and ran barefoot in the warm sand.

“I remember packing my red wagon with blankets and a picnic lunch my mother made for me and my sisters,” Brown says. “We would head out into the desert to find the perfect creosote bush to build a fort and have our picnic. Lots of sweet memories there.”

Back then, she was a self-described “desert girl.” Brown didn’t think about becoming an artist, but, in retrospect, she feels as if she “thought outside the box” at an early age. When it came time for college, she enrolled at the Utah Valley Community College in Orem where, among other courses, she took two art classes, drawing and watercolor. The watercolor class struck an artistic chord. “I loved the fluidity of the colors when they touched the paper,” she says. “Plus, I got an A, which is hard to do in a college art class.”

Both the enjoyment of creating a painting as well as the satisfaction of excelling stayed with her. A few years after college, still in her early 20s, she picked up her paintbrushes again with a singular goal in mind—to become a professional fine artist one day.

The first step on her journey, Brown recalls, was to teach herself how to paint. To accomplish this, she created dozens of postcards in watercolors. Brown sold the landscapes and florals for $1.50 to $2 each in her grandmother’s antique shop in Orem. “I was always excited when I would sell one,” she says. “It gave me the confidence to keep pursuing my art.”

In time she moved on to acrylics and learned how to paint quickly. “Painting a landscape in acrylic can be challenging, because it would dry so fast, especially in the hot desert,” she says.
“I loved learning how to manipulate the paint using thin layers, and then using thicker layers of paint.”

Brown used photographs from old Arizona Highways magazines as reference material and inspiration. And it wasn’t long before the budding artist and entrepreneur was selling acrylic paintings on eBay for $25 each. By the end of her eBay foray in 2005, she had sold 100 paintings. “This was the year I grew most quickly as an artist,” Brown says.

Eventually frustrated with acrylics and unable to paint clouds to her satisfaction, she took another step along her creative journey. “The acrylics were unforgiving,” Brown says. “I decided oil would be a better medium for them. I took the leap and developed a combination of using oil clouds and an acrylic gradient sky in the background of my paintings. It worked like magic for me.”

In 2021, Brown was invited to participate in the Cowgirl Up! show held at the Desert Caballeros Western Museum in Wickenburg, Arizona. It was a seminal milestone in her career. She had been a professional fine artist for nearly a decade, participating in gallery shows and expositions, such as the annual LA Art Show. But this was her first invitation to a museum exhibition. “The show changed my career,” Brown says. “I sold out at the show.”

In the aftermath of Cowgirl Up!, new collectors came her way, galleries called and more invitations to show her work arrived. As Brown is fond of saying, she went from working at a speed of 45 miles an hour to 110 miles. “It was off to the races,” she jokes.

Around that time, she also was invited to join a handful of artists in a show titled, The Art of Our Photography, sponsored by Arizona Highways. The magazine asked artists to pick a favorite photographic image from the publication’s 100-year history and use it as reference material for a painting. “I died and went to heaven to even be considered,” Brown says. “I picked an iconic image of Superstition Mountain. The coolest part is that I had the original 1956 magazine from years ago when I taught myself how to paint using Arizona Highways for reference. The show signified a full circle in my art career.”

The year 2023 unfolded as a busy one for Brown. Invitations to prestigious museum shows are a regular occurrence these days. For example, this past year her artworks were not only in Cowgirl Up! once again but she received her first invite to the Small Works, Great Wonders exhibition at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, held in November.

As this story was going to press, Brown was hard at work in her studio. On her easel rested a work in progress, a painting featuring the Superstition Mountains. The artwork, she says, is probably headed for The Russell 2024, an annual art auction which benefits the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana.

Her passion for the desert runs deep and remains unwavering. “The desert comes across as a very harsh environment but if you take the time to explore it, you begin to see the hidden beauties,” Brown says. “The desert has been instilled in my heart forever.”

Bonnie Gangelhoff is a Colorado-based writer and former senior editor of Southwest Art.

contact information
naomibrownart.com

representation
The Signature Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, thesignaturegallery.com

upcoming shows
The Russell, C.M. Russell Museum, Heritage Inn, Great Falls, MT, March 14-16.
Cowgirl Up!, Desert Caballeros Western Museum, Wickenburg, AZ, March 22-September 1.

This story appeared in the December 2023/January 2024 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.