Art has always been in Deborah Brown English’s blood. Many of her ancestors and relatives were artists or writers, with one of her relatives having been a portrait painter who operated in New York in the 1910s and 1920s.
But English initially had no plans to become an artist herself. She wanted to become a fiction author, but writing fiction did not initially seem like it was in the cards for her.
“It was tradition that we were brought up with lots of reading and lots of looking at pictures, but I never had any contemplation of becoming a professional artist,” she recalls.
“I became an amateur writer. I majored in English in college and wrote whenever I had an opportunity to — usually essays for organizations. And that was that, or so I thought.”
But crafts were one of English’s hobbies outside of writing. In the 1980s, she decided to return to school for an arts education and enrolled in the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in a program for people who already had an education in the liberal arts.
Since then, English has worked as a professional artist. Her paintings have been featured in museums like the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Academy Art Museum in Easton, as well as galleries such as the Steven Scott Gallery in Pikesville.
After all these years, though, English is putting her two passions — art and writing — together into her first book.
Set to be published in spring 2025, “Time’s Breath” combines her paintings with accompanying short stories, connected by an overarching narrative about a mysterious island and a lost civilization.
The book is an “illustrated novel,” somewhere between a standard novel with no pictures and a graphic novel. English created the world of “Time’s Breath” with a series of paintings and expanded it through the text.
While studying at MICA, English discovered the practice of automatic painting from two of her mentors, artists James Hennessey and Barry Nemett.
Nemett in particular was a proponent of automatic painting — the process of painting from nothing and letting outside elements like music dictate a piece — and would often have his students take part in the practice to understand rhythm in art.
“You basically dance with your hand to the music and it makes images,” English explains. “It’s a wonderful way to unlock ideas about composition and so forth, and I became quite dependent on it.”
English’s automatic paintings are influenced by all different kinds of music, from ballet suites to artists like Philip Glass and The Rolling Stones. And it was one such automatic painting that gave her the idea for “Time’s Breath.”
“A title occurred to me right away: ‘Some of Our Gods Are Born Here,’” English says of the initial painting. “But that implies that someone is talking to someone else, like a tour guide.
And that means that there’s someone, a traveler, who is visiting that place. That title was the embodiment of a story, so that’s where it started. Who was this person? Who was giving them a tour? What are they touring and why is that place interesting?”
Initially, “Time’s Breath” was meant to be a series of paintings. But the implications of “Some of Our Gods Are Born Here” continued to nag at English. Her husband, Philip, suggested turning those paintings into a book, and the project took off from there.
“Time’s Breath” took about five years to make and consists of over 150 paintings and accompanying stories, with the paintings being made first.
Their mediums and subjects often vary, with some being oil paintings and others being charcoal sketches depicting animals, natural formations and scenes that would later be integrated into the story.
“After the first painting, I started working on a lot of other canvases that could be this place,” English says. “They focused a lot on water and sunlight, but they didn’t
go anywhere as a story. I liked the paintings, but they didn’t make any sense to me at first. I can’t remember how I thought of the idea of a lost island, but it made everything click.”
The book was originally conceived as a collection of short stories, but an overarching story emerged as certain plot threads began to overlap and tie together.
Writing your first book in your 70s may seem like a daunting process, but English notes her age and experience as being an advantage.
She’s already hard at work on her next project: “Muses of Agrigento,” another automatic painting series.
“I feel more confident as an artist than I did before,” she says. “I’ve been at it for a long time.”