Cultural Writing. Travel. THE NORTH POLE is a compelling account of a summer trip the author made to the North Pole on a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker. Brown intersperses her narrative with excerpts from the journal of Fritdjof Nansen, who explored the area a hundred years ago, and with conversations with travelers, scientists, and a polar archivist about ideas concerning the Arctic that affect the world today, including the issue of global warming. In the chapter called "The Weather," Brown delivers a clear, accessible, scientifically accurate description of the complex phenomena that cause climate change. Lushly produced, with a foldout map and 120 full-color photographs.
Kathan Brown is an artist, writer, printer, and entrepreneur who founded Crown Point Press, publishers of artists' etchings, in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1962. On the Press's twenty-fifth anniversary, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted an exhibition of its work, and its thirty-fifth anniversary was celebrated by an exhibition at the National Gallery, Washington D. C. Archives of its work are owned by The National Gallery and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Brown's initial publishing program focused on local artists--etchings by Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud were the first two projects she published. Artists began coming to Crown Point from New York in the early 1970s, and by the end of the decade Brown was inviting artists from around the world. The Crown Point artist-list includes Chuck Close, Sol LeWitt, John Cage, Shahzia Sikander, Richard Tuttle, Kiki Smith, Peter Doig, Pat Steir, Laura Owens, Fred Wilson, and many others. In the 1980s Brown added Asian woodcut techniques to Crown Point's etching program, and took American artists to Japan and China to work with printers in those countries.
The Press has two active websites (www.crownpoint.com and www.Magical-Secrets.com) and in San Francisco, with a staff of ten, operates a public gallery and two large private etching studios. Each year, five or six invited artists work at the Press for two weeks at a time with the technical assistance of Brown's printers. Kathan Brown is the author of six books, the most recent of which is Magical Secrets About Thinking Creatively: The Art of Etching and the Truth of Life (Crown Point/Prestel 2006). It deals with ideas about creativity that she has learned from working closely over four decades with some of the most influential visual artists of our time.
