Laughable Display

Scituate Artist’s Building 19 work on Exhibit

By Jeffrey White
THE PATRIOT LEDGER

People stabbed at cheese cubes, drank wine from plastic cups and popped open cans of Red Dog .. Beer. The small room smelled of baked goods. Absent were the tuxedos. and gowns common at the openings of highbrow art exhibits.

OK, so this was not the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum and this was not your typical art show.

But then Scituate’s Mat Brown has never thought of himself as your typical artist. “You just don’t think of commercial art being in an art show;’ said Brown, 67.

Brown is the chief cartoonist for Building 19, the Hingham-based chain of discount stores, and his work - caricatures, cartoons and offbeat advertisements - fills the store’s weekly circulars.

Those circulars, stuffed in local newspapers, reach a lot of people.

After admiring Brown’s work for years, Lydia Eccles recently approached Brown and asked if she could display his work at the Oni Gallery in Boston’s Chinatown, where she works. The Oni, spread over two upper floors of a building on Washington Street, supports local artists of all media whose work shows “creativity without ‘pretension;’ Eccles said.

“This gallery is about stuff that doesn’t call itself fine art;’ Eccles said. “We admire the fact that (Brown) has done something so creative with his work. He’s an incredible draftsman’.

So, this past Saturday, an exhibit called simply “Mat” opened at the Oni.

It was well-attended - “mostly people I knew;’ Brown said later with a laugh and Brown, dressed in slacks and a navy turt1eneck, walked people through the 50 drawings on display.

Those familiar with Building 19’s advertisements and circulars know that the caricature of the company’s founder and CEO, Jerry Ellis, figures prominently in most of the drawings.

The circulars have the look of a comic book. Product ads often have characters, story lines and dialogue boxes. All of it promotes the Building 19 mantra: “Good stuff, cheap!’

The pages are produced by a five person cartoon and advertising department headed by Brown. The company’s commercial artists do everything from developing the concept of the advertisement cartoons to writing the little stories and the big headlines that go with them.

Sitting in his office late last week, Brown was hunched over his drawing board, working on the cover cartoon for Building 19’s Columbus Day circular - a picture of Ellis as Columbus, discovering a “new world of bargains:’