She made the transition from theatrical work to easel painter toward the end of the 1940s In 1949 she emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York City.
[3] In her later career, Browning created works in the style of magic realism that increasingly blurred the lines between the real and the imagined.
[8] In works such as Picture of a Painting of the Great Circus Parade (1988) and Black Umbrella (1970) the artist captures a real event but with a focus on the wonderful and a blurred sense of reality.
[8] A leader in the Modern and Post-Modern revivals of Realism in American art, Browning is a realist whose work defies attempts to categorize it.
Her work is largely recognized for its superior command of materials and media and for her unwavering devotion to understanding the human condition.
In each, dreamy and highly nuanced faces peer out of windows framed by the bold slashes of spray-painted designs.
Her work, with an endowment to support its exhibition, was bequeathed by her husband’s estate to the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, which organized this traveling retrospective in conjunction with Philip Eliasoph, a professor of art history at Fairfield University and the author of “Colleen Browning: The Enchantment of Realism.”[4] Browning was a National Academician.
Browning's distinctive brand of figurative painting, with subjects ranging from eerie worshipers in a Guatemalan church to graffiti- covered Harlem subway cars to the surrealist still life Fruits and Friends (1978, Harmon-Meek Galleries, Naples, Fl.
Nevertheless, Browning developed and maintains a wry, multi-hued personal stamp to her painting which for almost four decades has set it apart from prevailing fashion.