Mapmaking is like a science, requiring exact measurements and precise points. Casual observers may have a hard time imagining how artistic flair may fit into the cartographic process.
But for 20 years, Connie Brown and Redstone Studios have created maps that aren’t just works of art, but are significant representations of life events for people around the world. The maps Brown has been commissioned to create symbolize triumphs, journeys, heritage, and more—all of it against a geographic backdrop.
The result is a map that’s more art than science and more sentiment than simply art.
Brown didn’t start out as a cartographer. She didn’t start out as an artist, for that matter, though she loved art from an early age—particularly science art, for reasons she still can’t explain. She was especially drawn to science art from 18th century England, which she describes as a time when the art counted as much as the science.
Though she grew up with a passion for drawing and painting, she became an English teacher.
“I thought, ‘I’ll teach literature, and I’ll just always want to draw and paint,’” she said.
Her life’s map read differently, however. There came a point when divorce and unemployment affected her plans. While her kids went off to camp one summer, one of them suggested she go off to camp as well. So she did. She went on a hike of the Pyrenees, and, while there, she decided to map her adventure when she returned.
“It was more of another distraction from looking for work,” Brown said.
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It was a pivotal moment. As she completed her map, she wondered if she’d be able to make maps for a living.
So she asked a friend, “What if we made maps?”
“And my friend said warily, ‘Do we know how to make maps?’” she remembered. “And I said, ‘How hard can it be?’—and it turns out it was hard.”
Still, if destiny has charted your course, it will happen. Brown took the initiative to send one of their maps to an editor at the New York Times. Assuming no one would open it, Brown was surprised that someone did—and that someone subsequently published a small piece about their mapmaking prowess.
“It was a little thing, but being that it was the New York Times, that day our phone began to ring off the hook,” Brown said. “So then we really had to learn how to make maps.”
She now makes a successful living by making maps. Brown creates them for government departments, but she also creates them for individuals who want to map out something special in their lives or the lives of someone they love.
Brown has mapped the trip a couple took to China to adopt their daughter. She created a Civil War-style map chronicling Civil War experiences for the great-grandchildren of soldiers. Yet another map chronicles an Oregon family’s annual summer trip to the Cascades. The maps are a way to symbolically and geographically document a meaningful life experience in a beautiful, artistic way.
Brown said most of her clients want the early 18th-century-style maps, though she’s currently working with a client looking for a more contemporary map to match her contemporary art. Either way, Brown said, it’s an interesting journey.
“A lot of times they are mining their memories, they are reliving things, and you get to meet and talk to the most interesting people,” she said.
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Making maps provides a different challenge than fine art does, Brown said, because with the maps she’s not expressing herself; instead, she’s trying to translate an experience and express something for someone else.
Brown teaches mapping classes at her Connecticut studio and conducts workshops in New York City, including at the New York Public Library, where one of her maps and one of her globes sit in the permanent collection. She’ll bring her techniques to a workshop retreat at the C Gallery, where participants will learn how to translate their own experiences into expressions on canvas.
For the local workshop, the participants will work with round maps. Aspiring cartographers don’t need to have an artistic background; Brown will demonstrate not only how to find the significance in what they want to map, but in method.
Participants will use such cartographic resources as color, lettering type, ornamentation, and illustration in pencil, pen-and-ink, or colored pencil on watercolor.
Connie Rohde, C Gallery curator, said she was thrilled to be able to bring Brown out to teach the workshop.
“I am a planner and an analytical person,” Rohde explained. “I love seeing my life as a metaphor. It adds poetry to the mundane parts of life. The idea of mapping my personal and spiritual growth is very appealing to me, to see a visual of my life, growing at the center—maybe even a bit of very light glowing color at the center. How affirming.”
Weekend art retreats at the C Gallery are building the establishment’s reputation for combining concentrated art instruction and luxury. Participants stay in a pastoral vineyard cottage while enjoying fine wine and food from local vendors.
Brown has been featured in such publications as The New York Times, House and Garden, House Beautiful, Adventure, Travel & Leisure, Town & Country, Antiques and Fine Arts, and Men’s Vogue.
Arts Editor Shelly Cone is going places! Contact her at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 5, 2012.