This essay has two purposes. Firstly to examine how the preparatory methodologies made with the computer have extended the scope of Glenn Brown's paintings. And secondly, but not necessarily as a consequence, to demonstrate how Brown’s paintings offer a philosophical dialogue between the painter's subjectivity and virtual depth or space. It is this subjective relationship with the digital that I want to focus on because I believe it to be increasingly central to his practice.

The text is split into five parts: Part One, 'Shared Concerns' details my working relationship with Brown over the years. Part Two, 'Flat Painting' demonstrates his methods of making and how critics present this. Part Three: 'Methodologies', expands his copies of found photographs to include the use of digital tools. Part Four: 'Renaissance, Modernist and Computer-Augmented Spaces', explores the wider painting and optical context in which his work operates. And finally in Part Five: 'Imagined Realities: Future Painting', I make a phenomenological claim that Brown psychologically inhabits digital space but with topographical, physical means and that this gestation is a continual overlapping between his digital self and the world of objects.

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