Frederick Brosen was born in 1954.

He is a noted watercolor artist, whose creativity is inspired by the architecture of New York City. He studied art in that city at the Art Students League and the Pratt Institute, where he received his M.F.A. Mr. Brosen has been recognized with a Silver Medal of Honor by the Royal Society of Arts & Letters in London and a PollockKrasner Foundation Grant. Watercolors by Frederick Brosen have been acquired by the New-York Historical Society; the Knoxville Museum of Art (showing 500 of 935 characters); The Museum of the City of New York, Frye Art Museum (Seattle) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and are in many private collections.

Gotham is his muse and his primary subject as he celebrates the poetry of her streets. He has been at home in Paris, in London, in the cities and towns of Italy, painting them with the same understanding and affection that inform his views of his own neighborhood, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Yet Brosen is not a genre painter his interest lies in the built environment, its architecture, monuments, and public spaces.

Frederick Brosens paintings explore the constantly evolving urban landscapes of Paris and New York. Starting with preliminary graphite drawings, he uses watercolors to build transparent layers of color. As he adds layers, the colors deepen, growing increasingly nuanced and luminous. Brosen primarily studies the built environment: the ways in which architecture, monuments, figures, and public spaces interact to create patterns of light and shadow. He is particularly interested in sites of juxtaposition, where skyscrapers, churches, tenements, and water towers coexist. These components reveal that there is still an old New York that coexists

with the new. At dawn, Brosen travels on his bike in quest of new subjects, when the streets are devoid of the hustle-bustle of daily metropolitan life.

With painstaking care and commitment, he sketches a scene, photographs it, and sketches again. Finally painting, Brosen builds his color by starting with light washes and adding layer after layer of rich tone. The results are crystalline and sophisticated images that reflect each location through the intimacy of countless details. Over the years he has revisited favorite locations, marking changes as well as preserving what once was. Even if new developments are captured in the composition, Brosens work is often about the city as it used to be, with cobblestones and potholes, broken brick and sagging roofs. Brosens subjects are often set against intense skies which light his work. Brick facades glow and tiled rooftops shimmer, as transient light and weather effects play changing chords to illuminate his crystalline compositions. In Brosens work, there is a sense of time stopped and captured. Streets and the structures lining them become carriers for the expression in his art of formal qualities of rhythm, geometry, palette, and texture, the psychological bases of our visual delight in urban architecture. They represent the ingenuity of our minds and the fruits of our labor, our mark, as it were, on the vast universe.