Cecily Brown
"Her early works, such as those in 'The Skin Game', her first show at the Gagosian, were erotic, both in that they depicted sexual acts and in the way the consistency of the paint evoked such human textures.
'I think when I was doing a lot of sexual paintings,' she remembers, 'what I wanted - in a way that I think now is too literal - was for the paint to embody the same sensations that bodies would. Oil paint very easily suggests bodily fluids and flesh.'
But her images were too broken down to be pornographic. Her more recent Black Paintings, for example, clearly contain a naked figure, but they are more like hallucinations than depictions. 'I've been trying to get away from always having couples and sex,' she says. Ideally, she would like to produce an oeuvre that is not too coherent; though she thinks every painter has a mark that is instinctive, 'like the sound of your voice', she tries to push herself so that no one can say she paints a certain way." - interview by Gabby Wood (guardian)
That’s kind of a tricky one—it seems like such a loaded topic. There were moments when I worried about whether these are positive views of women. I think that my being conflicted about making nudes of women comes across in the paintings. I don’t even feel like they are really nudes because while there’s plenty of skin, there’s not really anything titillating. They feel melancholic, for the most part.
How do you feel about the idea of the ‘male gaze’?
"As a woman, you’re used to being looked at in person—well, not as much now as before [laughs]—just like, as a painter, you’re aware of the idea of the male gaze in art. It’s a complicated issue. I never thought I shouldn’t look at a painting of a woman just because it was made by a man. I always looked rather naively, and I always wanted to make paintings that stood apart from any kind of dogma. I do think we’re sort of beyond all that now. Mostly, I’ve just always wanted to keep making work that’s in opposition to whatever came before in my career. That’s why I have a hankering for the figurative now." - Cecily Brown ( interview by Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. ) The artist comments on how her images are viewed and the stigmas surrounding the male gaze, often present within older works, the pressure for women to be view as objects within painting, especially when nude, has orchestrated a revolution in how female artist thing about painting. Not one to shy away from the subject all together Brown, still admits to finding something awkward about painting nudes, she approaches it however, with the same flare that her other paintings possess.
"The boundaries of painting excite me. You've got the same old materials - just oils and a canvas - and you're trying to do something that's been done for centuries. And yet, within those limits, you have to make something new or exciting for yourself as well as other people.
I have always wanted to make paintings that are impossible to walk past, paintings that grab and hold your attention. The more you look at them, the more satisfying they become for the viewer. The more time you give to the painting, the more you get back.
I often avoid using the terms figuration and abstraction because I've always tried to have it both ways. I want the experience of looking at one of my paintings to be similar to the process of making the painting - you go from the big picture to something very intense and detailed, and then back again.
The viewer is a living, breathing being that moves about in space and I want the painting to be experienced like that. I want my painting to imitate life in that way. I want the experience of looking at it to be very much like the experience of walking through the world.
My process is really quite organic and starting a painting is one of the best parts for me. I always start in quite a loose and free way. I often put down one ground colour to begin with and then play off that. For the first day or two, everything moves very quickly - sometimes almost too quickly - then there's often this very protracted middle period of moving things around, changing things, editing.
Often, I find it really hard to see what I'm doing when I'm in the thick of things. I can get too precious and have to force myself to put my paintings aside. There's a wall in my studio where I hang paintings that I think are done or nearly done. Over time, I'll realise which ones are working and which aren't.
There's never a moment for me when I consciously add the last stroke. When a painting is 90-95% there, it's especially difficult because you know that it's really close and you also know that you could completely ruin it. Of course, I do often ruin things. I take things too far, and can't get them back ..." Extract from guardian interview with Cecily Brown.
Within Browns work it is notable that she paints the foreground often before the background, I adopted a similar approach towards some of my paintings in order to push myself to try something new. upon doing so I found it to be like a story, telling the viewer what happening in the moment before filling them in about what happened previously.
A result of that 'backwards working' meant that the areas of connection between the both layers became separated by a small pale line, which looked as if it was almost repelling the paint away so not to contaminate each other.
This behaviour is subject to displaying movement within the work, adding more layers of textual dialogue, that supports the context and subject that lie there within.
To get the most honest depictions of feeling, I allow myself to 'switch off' and try and regress back into a more childish state of mind, where nothing has to be a certain way. I can just use the paint as a extension of my hands.
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