People often tell Cecily Brown
that she paints like a man from the fifties. Her response? “Well, somebody’s got to do it."
Her large-scale, remarkably tactile oil paintings hover at the intersection between abstraction and
figuration, and are often compared to Abstract Expressionist works. Based on
the aggressive way she puts down paint and her star status in the art world,
one might assume Cecily Brown would be a little intimidating in person.
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And you can see why I might be intimidated.
(Cecily in Vanity Fair, 2000) |
However, when Cecily arrived at
the Academy two days before Halloween, I immediately felt at ease. She has a
warm smile and kind way of speaking, and carried a shopping bag filled with her
five-year-old daughter’s Halloween costume. As we rode the elevator to the
fourth floor, I asked her what her daughter was going to be – “A fox,” she answered. “My husband and I are dressing up as
the parent foxes… My daughter’s been talking about it for the entire year.”
Cecily
came to the Academy to conduct critiques as part of the visiting critics
program. Critiques are just what you would imagine - other artists entering
your studio and giving you feedback about your work. Sometimes the process is
inspiring and encouraging, and sometimes it’s downright deflating. Every critic
has something unique to say – some inspire new ideas, others help resolve
specific technical issues, and some leave an artist feeling confused and
overwhelmed. It’s not unusual to receive back-to-back critiques that
completely contradict one another. Although critiques can be frustrating at
times, critiques help artists clarify their direction, because they force us to
choose what advice to listen to and what to tune out.
***
After looking around my studio for
a few seconds, Cecily asks me was what kind of paint I use. I show her my
paints, which include a variety of brands, and some large tubes of Winton, Winsor
Newton’s student grade brand.
“Okay,” she says. “First thing – don’t use
Winton. Ever. It’s so shit. It’s just waxy and awful and ruins everything. I
think it might be impossible to make a good painting using Winton.”
She then zeroes in on a large
painting I’d done in my Painting 3 class of a nude model sitting with a dog, (a
life sized German Shepard stuffed animal, to be
exact). “What’s that red there? And this green thing?” she asks,
pointing to an area behind the model. I explain that this is a painting of
meat, (by Academy third year fellow Shangkai Kevin Yu), which we’d set up behind the model. The
green is a cactus. “Hmm. This is my favorite part,” says Cecily. “The most
interesting part is the most obscure part, where you can’t quite tell what’s
going on.” She pauses, and then continues. “I would just paint right over the
figure… But of course, I would say that,” she laughs.
Brown creates a unique aesthetic
reality by working with a constant conflict between her desire to paint the
figure, and her refusal to allow the figure to remain. “I never want to be
saying “this is the way it is” – when I feel like I’m naming something in too
final a way, or it’s too pinned down, that’s when I feel I have to say “but is
it really like that?”
She moves on to another painting, a
work in progress that had begun as three figures in a forest but is starting to
resemble a cow. She points to an area at the bottom right, a purpleish blob
that I hadn’t really considered. “This is like Francis Bacon’s rabid dog,” she
says. “Go with that.”
As Brown paints, she both imposes
her will upon the painting, and lets the painting tell her what it needs. “There’s
always another story going on that’s not the main story – look at the way these
marks are coming together,” again, referring to the dog. “It’s subtle, but may be more important than
the rest.” She urges me to squint, and look at the painting in a “gentle” way.
“What might be there that you’re not immediately seeing?”
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| Don't Bring me Down, 2011 |
I ask her about appropriating from
other artists. “Oh yeah, I take figures from art history and use them… Like
I’ll take a Goya figure, and then a Bacon figure… But it’s important to mix it
up between artists so it doesn’t become too derivative,” she says.
Brown is most drawn to figurative
paintings from the past. Her influences are mostly very old dead male painters
– Brueghel, Bosch, Goya, Titian, Rubens…
“These are people who I’ve loved for years, and I get so much out of – they
seem very much alive to me,” she has said. But of course, she also tends to
paint like a man from the twentieth century. She loves Beckmann, Bacon,
Baselitz, de Kooning, Guston… and many German painters. “I consider myself an
honorary German painter,” she says. Much has been made over the fact that
Cecily Brown is a woman working in this aggressive, male way of painting, but
she’s said this isn’t really of much importance to her. “Inevitably it’s got a feminine point of view because I’m a female, but
studio is one place I’m not really conscious of my gender... I’ve never set out
to do x as a woman - you just do your
work.”
I’m curious about Cecily’s process,
so ask her about how she begins a painting. “I just start,” she answered. “I
never do any kind of prep – I just go right into it. Sometimes I make drawings
about halfway through… but not usually.” Cecily doesn’t start with a clear idea
of what a painting will look like, and usually begins by laying down a wash of
colour. A form is suggested very quickly, and then she responds to what the
painting is giving her. “I don’t have the angst that some people do in front of
a white canvas, the problems for me start later. I begin, I don’t know what’s
going to happen, I see what’s going to happen based on first few marks. It’s a
very organic process.” She recommends working on several canvasses as a time,
and seeing how they influence each other. “I’m more focused when I’m more
spread out.”
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Brown in her studio
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“I think you need to bring some areas more
into focus, and clarify parts of the abstractions,” she tells me. She looks at
my most recent painting, of three figures on horseback in a landscape. “It’s a
bit muddy at the front. All this green is the same, and the head of this figure
is clear but then it kind of dissolves into mud. If you add something at the
front to clarify it, maybe some red, that could help. Have you looked at Delacroix?
He’s great at that.” She continues. “You don’t want the left and right to be
the same.” She advises me to look at every corner of the painting and make sure
it’s different. “And try bringing different
tempos to your painting,” she comments. “Paint really fast one day, and then go
back in and paint some areas slowly, more carefully.” Brown tends to paint
quite quickly and frenetically, but that comes after a long time of sitting,
staring at the paintings, trying to get clues as to how to proceed. “I spend a
lot of time of looking slowly so that I can paint quickly.”
***
The goal in the second year at the
Academy is to develop a cohesive body of work to present to the world. I think
a lot of people who don’t make art on a regular basis assume that a given
artist has a natural “style” or way of making things, and that that’s just the
way it is. In reality, though, the more skill you have, the more options you
have available to you, and the more you might feel like you can be 50 different
artists doing 50 completely different things. For example, I’m mostly doing
abstract painting these days, but took a master class with Will Cotton last
weekend and made a the most rendered portrait I’ve ever painted.
The “cohesion” factor comes from
making conscious decisions about what to emphasize and what to let go of in
one’s work. This semester, I’ve begun to realize that what I’m best at and most
interested in is working in a fairly intuitive manner. When I start a painting
with a rigid idea of how I want it to look at the beginning, and follow this
program through to the end, my work tends to look lifeless, or “choked up,” as
my thesis advisor commented. As trite as it may sound, I am learning that my
strength comes when I am able to let go, and follow my intuition. I found
having Cecily Brown come into my studio incredibly helpful, because she had
specific formal ways to approach this sort of painting. Cecily is an inspiring example
of an artist who works in this way, but whose work still demands a tremendous
amount of rigor. Her decisions are still highly formal and aesthetically based.
Although she certainly throws paint around, she isn’t just throwing it around
for the sake of it. She may not have a map when she begins, but trusts that
she’ll be able to figure out the painting as she goes along.
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Claire Cushman (MFA 2015) is a painter and
Social Media scholar with a penchant for blogging. From time to time
check in on the Academy's blog to read more entries from Claire throughout the
year.
