Colleen in Harlem

When Irish-born Colleen Browning first saw Harlem 16 months ago, she was struck by "the long, straight streets, the litter, the children's drawings on the pavement, all the life against the dead-looking buildings." Since Colleen Browning is an artist, she set about painting what she saw, and last week she put 13 pictures on display in a Manhattan gallery. Harlem has been painted more expertly, but seldom with more sympathy or with a quicker eye for vivid detail.

Artist Browning, 28, the daughter of a British general, went to her first art school at 15. By the time she was 17, she was so good at painting willowy maidens in sylvan settings that some of her work was displayed at London's Royal Academy. After more art school, she gave up her Royal Academy style, but she stuck to her interest in scenes with a generous horizontal sweep to them. In Harlem she learned to paint in verticals.

A good example of Browning's new style is Seesaw, a group of children teeter-tottering dizzily up a perpendicular canvas. Another Browning trick: painting her Harlemites from above, so that the figures can be seen against a background of pavement litter and sidewalk doodles.

After more than a year of painting Harlem, Artist Browning feels that she has anything but exhausted her subject. She thinks she may have made her canvases too bustlingly crowded. Looking at her exhibit last week, she seemed "to see people all dashing around." Next step: "Some simpler studies, more serious and not quite so larky."

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