Cecily Brown
b. 1969British · Late 20th Century & Contemporary 1960–present
Her paintings hover at the edge of legibility: bodies appear and dissolve back into the surface as you look, and whether you are seeing a figure or a passage of paint changes depending on how long you stand there.
Formation
Trained at the Slade School in London, and moved to New York in the mid-1990s, where the work developed. She has cited de Kooning consistently, along with Poussin, Goya, Rubens and Hogarth, and her practice is unusually explicit about working from the history of painting — many pictures begin from a specific historical composition that is then dismantled.
Technique
Oil, layered and continuously revised. Brown builds pictures over long periods, painting over and through earlier states so that fragments of previous compositions remain visible, and works both from imagination and from source images. The brushwork is fast and various — flicked, dragged, scumbled, scraped — with the marks kept discrete rather than blended, so the surface reads as a field of individual gestures that resolve into imagery intermittently. The scale is generally large, and the compositions are all-over rather than focused on a centre.
The palette
Hot, high-key and deliberately overloaded. Pinks, reds, oranges and acid greens against blues and whites, with colours placed adjacent at full saturation so they vibrate rather than settle. Flesh tones are distributed across the whole canvas rather than confined to bodies, which is precisely what makes the figures hard to locate: the same pink that is a thigh in one area is only paint in the next. The colour does the work that outline would otherwise do, and refuses it.
Legacy
She is central to the argument that gestural painting remained a live proposition after its supposed exhaustion, and her position between abstraction and figuration is deliberately unresolved rather than transitional. The engagement with historical composition — taking a Poussin or a Hogarth apart and rebuilding it — has been influential on a subsequent generation working similarly with the canon.
Further reading: Cecily Brown (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series) — Courtney J. Martin, Jason Rosenfeld, Francine ProsePalette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.
Pigments used: Cadmium yellow · Ochre · Lead white · Alizarin crimson · Cadmium red · Viridian · Sap green · Cobalt blue · Cerulean blue · Titanium white · Umber · Sienna