More than 30 years ago, artist Mike Brown painted a burst of colour on the side of a North Fitzroy terrace house at the corner of Grant and McKean streets., was considered a significant piece of art by one of the city’s renegade painters and early graffitists.
“A lot of the locals were attached to it,” says independent curator Kirsten Rann, who works at Charles Nodrum Gallery in Richmond, which has long featured Brown’s work. He was also a celebrated artist in his own right, with works displayed in the National Gallery of Victoria, as well as every major public art gallery across Australia, and in the homes of many wealthy collectors.
“[They are] the most promisingly creative sector of modern youth,” wrote Brown. “We have an art bureaucracy that costs us millions, supporting an inbred and narcissistic coterie of ‘high artists’.“Yet, when an authentic art-of-the-people spontaneously erupts on the streets and railways, society reacts as though plague had broken out.”profile in 1988.
“In many ways, Mike was a one-person artistic movement, which is why he’s not better known. He was a complete nonconformist in every way in the art that he made.”