40 is a collaboration by Brad Brown and Stan Adler. The project consists of forty drawings aligned with forty narratives to make up 40 chapters.
The drawings came first. Brown worked on the drawings over the course of the last ten years, allowing conscious and incidental marks to accumulate on the pages over the course of time. The 11x11 inch drawings are made of oil, charcoal, pen and ink, color pencils, and watercolor. Brown completed the series in March of 2009 and offered them to Adler as impetus and maps for narratives, thus reversing the typical order where the artist illustrates an existing text.
Adler’s narratives represent an opening up and culmination of alternating story lines that follow recurring characters lost and deranged at the epicenter of the sprawl or stalled at Robert Johnson type crossroads or traveling somewhere up there(ranging from the Sierra to deep space) on missions of revelation, reconnaissance, and exploration.
See Parts 1, 2, and 3 in Evergreen Review Issues No. 122, 124, and 126.
