Brenda Christian Brown is a practicing Zen Buddhist, published author, and a transdisciplinary conceptual artist. She holds a BA in Education, a BFA in Visual Art, and an MFA in Transdisciplinary Visual Arts. Lifelong research includes philosophy, neuroscience, the arts (both liberal and fine), the practice of meditation, and the psychological process of flow and mindfulness. Brown turned to the study of creativity, multidisciplinary conceptual artists, and aesthetic polymaths to find examples of self-actualized thinkers who use their subconscious and superconscious minds to process infinite possibilities and express their findings through art and writing.

Both Zen and contemporary conceptual art have commonalities. It is as E. E. Cummings describes in The Agony of the Artist (with a capital A). “Whatever Art stands for is whatever cannot be learned. Indeed, the Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he had learned, in order to know himself; and the agony of the Artist, far from being the result of the world’s failure to discover and appreciate him, arises from his own personal struggle to discover, to appreciate and finally to express himself.”

For the last five years, she has been working on a manuscript to describe the connections she has found between the philosophy of Zen, Fine Art, and the psychology of flow. On this website, she hopes you enjoy the self-actualized thinkers and aesthetic polymaths she has shared with you under her blog. Articles based on her manuscript are available as her artist’s book entitled Zen and the Art of the Journal, on this website. Her thesis for her graduate degree by the same name is found on Digital Commons@Georgia Southern.