Jeffrey Brown writes autobiographical graphic novels, as well as being a writer of comics.
I like the way he draws everything in a very clumsy manner and how most of his work is in black and white.
Although his drawings appear to be simple line drawings and often seem disproportioned and messy, I think they are the best things ever. I like the truthfulness of the art and how the narrative flows easily through each drawing.
This is a segment of one of Jeffrey Brown's autobiographical pieces, the drawing style is visible in all of his work, whether it is a drawing of robots or people, the way they are drawn is always stylistically the same.
Brown's comic strips are different in content, but again, the same style of drawing. They exist mainly around the element of humour. This is the same humour shown in all of Brown's work, a kind of intelligent, observant, sometimes immature but always very honest sense of humour.
Jeffrey Brown is my most favourite illustrator and he is the main influence behind my work and his books inspired me to start drawing my own comics, so it was quite interesting to research who his influences are.
In an interview I read
here, Brown stated some of his influences as being Egon Schiele, David Shrigley and Charlotte Salomon.
I looked at some of their work to see how it linked to Brown and found a few connections.
Egon Schiele:
I found that some of Schiele's work can be linked to Jeffrey Brown's style, Schiele distorts the figure and uses a lot of angles which can also be seen in Brown's work, particularly when he draws people nude. In some of his books he has drawn women sitting undressed and they look very similar to this seated naked woman by Schiele.
David Shrigley:
Shrigley is the easiest of Brown's influences to compare his work to, as their styles are very similar. They both work mainly in black and white and their work is usually line drawings. Shrigley has a much looser line than Brown and frequently scribbles out large areas of his work, whereas Brown's illustrations are seemingly well organised and have fewer crossings out in them.
Charlotte Salomon:
Salomon's work holds few similarities to that of Brown's, her work is done with gouache and is usually in full colour and sometimes quite abstract. I found that the main thing I could see in Salomon's paintings that is also visible in Brown's comics is the handwritten text.
Similarly to Brown, Salomon writes on her work and the writing is all freehand and is sometimes clumsy and changes size at random. Her writing often becomes the focal point of the art and is seen on some of Brown's work, in that sometimes a piece of writing will take up more space than the illustration and is much more detailed.
I also think Salomon's work has a very strong written narrative and reads like a story, in the same way as Brown's comic strips.
