Dan Brown: Finding Art in Everything
- SJIMA
- Apr 9
- 5 min read
Updated: Apr 10
Iron and Wood — Sculptures of the Northwest | Sterner Atrium Gallery | March 6 – June 1, 2026
There's a humpback whale at SJIMA right now, frozen mid-surge through an old wagon wheel rim, as if it has just passed all the way through a ring of its own bubbles. It's made of metal, it weighs what metal weighs, and yet it seems to breathe. That tension — between the weight of found material and the life it's been coaxed into — is exactly what Dan Brown does.
Iron and Wood: Sculptures of the Northwest fills SJIMA's Sterner Atrium Gallery with Brown's constructed sculptures, crafted from metal, wood, and found objects. Fish appear to swim. An eagle looks as though it just caught the wind. And alongside the sculpture, Brown's watercolor paintings of trout bring a different kind of playful energy to the space — fantastical, scientifically-minded, and full of dry humor. Together, the work is a portrait of an artist who has spent a lifetime looking closely at the natural world and finding unexpected ways to bring it back to life.
From Wildlife Biology to Welding
Dan Brown didn't set out to be a sculptor. He grew up on U.S. Fish and Wildlife refuges across the West, where his father managed waterfowl habitat — including the Kootenai National Wildlife Refuge in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. He was a kid who fished, hunted, and spent as much time outside as possible. He graduated from Washington State University with a degree in wildlife biology and went on to earn a master's in education.
His first teaching job was a science position at a small school in Soap Lake, Washington. When the school wanted to offer art, Brown volunteered — he was artistic, he figured he could manage it. One period a day became a serious avocation, and then a vocation. After a stint in the Peace Corps alongside his wife, working in a national park in Paraguay, Brown returned to the States and landed an art teaching position in Okanogan, Washington, where he would spend the next 29 years as the sole art teacher for Okanogan Middle and High School.
Teaching everything — drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics — forced a versatility that still defines his practice. "I tried to make many artistic experiences available to my students," Brown has said. "I really like the assignments I gave my students and end up doing many of them myself." In 2001, the Washington Art Educators' Association recognized his commitment with their "Golden Apple" award, naming him high school art teacher of the year.
The Turn to Sculpture
His path to metal sculpture was, as he puts it, sideways. Noticing that a local gallery he admired was well-stocked with two-dimensional work but had room for a sculptor, and with his wife gifting him a plasma cutter and welder one Christmas, Brown made the pivot. He hasn't looked back.
The process he's developed is deliberate and deeply observational. When he sets out to sculpt an animal, he studies photographs and video extensively — watching how the creature moves, what posture defines it, what gesture will make it recognizable. For birds, he starts with the beak, which he considers the hardest element to get right. Then the body, then the wings. He works in rebar, bending it to match a flat cartoon outline he's drawn, then coaxing three-dimensionality and motion into the form.
"I love to give them a little bit of animation," he says. "I think it adds a little bit of life to them."
The found-object dimension of his work goes back even further — to a childhood memory of a man living in the basement of the maintenance worker at his father's first wildlife refuge. The man would pull wire from the local landfill and weave it into beautiful baskets. Brown traces his instinct for repurposing materials back to that early impression, reinforced through years of thrifty college living and three decades of stretching a school art budget. At home, he recycles nearly everything and grows much of his own food. The sustainability isn't incidental — it's baked into how he sees the world.
The humpback whale sculpture on view in the Sterner Atrium carries this history. That metal hoop the whale swims through? It's a rim from a real wagon. And the reason the whale is angled just so is that Brown once had to rebalance it for a public display, and the new position happened to capture something true about how humpbacks surge through their own bubble rings to feed.
The Trout
Brown is a fly fisherman, which perhaps explains his particular fondness for trout. A chance conversation in a Spokane novelty shop sent him home to research redband trout — a rainbow trout with a vivid horizontal stripe — and he painted his own version, letting the name and markings inspire a fantastical reinterpretation. That became the model for an entire book: Trout: A Fictitious History, a collection of watercolor paintings featuring real trout species rendered with invented characteristics and Brown's characteristic dry humor.
Several of those watercolors are on view in the Atrium alongside the sculptures. They're a different register of the same sensibility — careful attention to the real thing, then a deliberate imaginative leap into what it could be.
Why Art Is a Necessity
Recently retired from teaching, Brown lives in Okanogan, where he splits his time between making art, fishing, bicycling, skiing, and building a house next door for his parents. He has traveled on six of the seven continents and walked the Camino de Santiago. His public sculptures stand at sites across the Pacific Northwest: on the Olympia waterfront as part of the Percival Plinth Project, at the Auburn Downtown Sculpture Gallery, at Sleeping Lady Resort in Leavenworth, and along the Arlington art trail, among others.
When asked why making art is a necessity for him — a question he admits stumped him at first — he arrived at an answer that's both honest and disarming. He needs to be active. He needs to make things he can see. And when he's deep in solving a problem — figuring out how a piece of metal wants to move, how to fix a form that isn't working yet — the focus calms everything else down.
"It kind of eliminates the rest of the world," he says. "And I guess that's the real need is to just be happy doing something. And making art makes me happy. Really happy."
Meet the Artist: An Interview with Dan Brown
Dan Brown spoke with us here in the Sterner Atrium Gallery at the opening of Iron and Wood. Hear him talk about growing up on wildlife refuges, the origins of his found-object practice, and how a plasma cutter changed the course of his creative life. Click the image below to watch.
Iron and Wood: Sculptures of the Northwest is on view in the Sterner Atrium Gallery through June 1, 2026. SJIMA is located at 540 Spring Street in Friday Harbor and is open Friday through Monday, 11 AM–5 PM. Admission is $10 for adults; Members and children under 18 are always free. On Mondays, admission is pay-what-you-like.
SJIMA gratefully acknowledges the generous support that makes our Spring 2026 exhibitions possible: Honeywell Foundation, Mark Torrance Foundation, Town of Friday Harbor, San Juan County. In-Kind Sponsors: Browne’s Home Center, Harbor Rental, Printonyx, Terry Ogle Painting
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