IN RETROSPECT | THE ARTISTIC JOURNEY Family Life
My parents were only seventeen years old when I came into their world. I was born Larry O’Neill Brown, Jr. on December 19, 1962, to Diretha Victoria Hall, my mother, and Larry O’Neill Brown, Sr., my father. Additionally, I had one older sister, Hilda, and one younger sister, Jacqueline. Both of my teenage parents were born in 1945, so we were a rare house of all baby boomers. We were also the typical struggling lower, middle class African American family surviving the climate of the 1960s and 1970s in blue-collar Baltimore City.
Diretha Victoria Hall, my mother, and Larry O’Neill Brown, Sr.
My father was a senior at Carver Vocational-Technical High School around the time I was born. He began his aspirations of becoming an artist by selecting commercial art as his trade, but after a few years of financial pressure and job prospect frustrations, my father made the decision to switch his area of study to printing. It was my father’s vocational training that eventually made it possible for him to transition into a job as a linotype operator at a few printing facilities in Baltimore. One of the Baltimore facilities was the Afro-American Newspaper. He was often the only person of color on the job working as a typesetter and linotype operator. He was later recruited by Baltimore City schools via a special workers equivalency program and transitioned into a career in vocational educa-
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tion teaching printing in several area Baltimore City schools. In addition to his printing career, my father was also a championship wrestler, who later coached high school and college level wrestling, cross country, and track and field. I remember looking up to my father and wishing I had his talent and athletic abilities. He was a self-taught artist, and I grew up with his work all over the walls of our house. It was not uncommon for us to do small print jobs in our kitchen on a small platen printing press that he kept at the house. After a while I figured out that I actually liked printing. The only problem was I didn’t feel like my father wanted me imitating anything he was doing. It seemed no matter how much I tried to please him, I usually was criticized by him or ended up feeling rejected. It became apparent that much of this energy was because my father was a frustrated artist. There were few opportunities in those days for young black men to pursue art, or art careers. This was at the core of why my father shifted his area of study from art to printing. I’m sure these frustrations manifested in our creative interactions. Nonetheless, I decided at a young age that art was going to be my path. From as early as I can remember, art was a part of my life. Looking back, it was apparent from an early age the way art drew me in. It may have been because I was born the son of a teenage parent who sacrificed his dream of being an artist to take care of his family. I watched my father, not knowing what he was actually going through, try to paint. It was always a mystery to me what he was thinking? How was he feeling? Where was the imagery coming from? I attempted to try to do the things I saw my father doing. As a young child, all I could do was imitate, like most sons, who aspire to be like their father. My father, on the other hand, was a frustrated artist, which I think made him become a little competitive instead of nurturing. I also think it motivated him to deter me from that dream because in the 1960s and 1970s my father did not have the outlet to be a successful artist. At that same time, I experienced several opportunities to witness my father interacting with other notable Baltimore artists like Ernest Kromah, Robert Torrance, Thomas Stockett and various others. But something always seemed strange to me as a child. All of these wonderfully gifted black men were
