By LEAH WEATHERSBY

Most artists will try to attract you to their studio with their profound ideas or expert brush strokes. Josh Brown offers something extra - coffee and pancakes.

Brown, 28, is a Fremont artist who lives, paints, sculpts and cooks at the Fremont Fine Arts Foundry, a building full of artists' lofts owned by Peter Bevis.

Brown moved to the Foundry a year ago and got both help and inspiration from his new neighbors.They taught him many new techniques such as how to work with glass and bronze and how to make molds.

To thank his fellow Foundry tenants and the Fremont community at large for their support, Brown hosted a breakfast at his studio on St. Patrick's Day last year. Seventy-five people turned out, filling his small live-work space to overflowing. The event was so successful that Brown decided to offer free breakfasts to all comers every first and third Sunday of the month.

These community meals generally run late into the afternoon and Brown, wearing his own chef's hat, doesn't hesitate to head back to the kitchen when late arrivals show up. When asked why he continues the twice-monthly grind, Brown offers a typically easy-going response:

"I still keep meeting people who are great," Brown says. "It's cheap, it's easy and everybody likes breakfast. It's easy to please people around the breakfast table."

"The whole thing is kind of about community building," says Kristin Foss, a Phinney Ridge resident and regular attendee of Brown's breakfast events. "(It's) making a little village in the middle of huge metropolis."

So do free pancakes make art patrons out of hungry guests? Apparently not. Brown says he has yet to sell a single piece to his Sunday visitors, but he doesn't care.

"I don't push it," says Brown. "It's better just to offer people something for no reason."

While Brown's career as a breakfast host is going gang-busters, his career as a visual artist has been slower to take off. Though his studio is crowded with work that runs the gambit from landscape painting to lung-shaped ash trays, Brown, who moved from Montana to Seattle in 1994 to get his artistic career going, says he his just now starting to look for representation from local art galleries.

Several of Brown's works will be shown throughout the month of March at Touchstone Bakery, located at 501-A North 36th in Fremont.

"I've spent a little more than a decade working out my artistic grove," says Brown. "I've spent a lot of time trying to pull together a cohesive collection."

For now, Brown manages to pay his bills thanks to a day job in a Kent factory where he makes signs and other fabricated items. He plans to continue hosting his Sunday get-togethers, which are perhaps his greatest personal statement to date. As Brown says, "You're great, I'm great, let's have breakfast."

For more information about Brown's breakfast events, call 356-7720.