Cecily Brown Interview: Totally Unaware

[Music] the triptych the last painting in the show where why and how often room with whom it's an interesting question to wonder how it shows how I see the world it's fragmented I guess we were just talking about New York City as well I've lived there for 25 years and I think the experience of living in a very busy city inevitably feeds into the way I see things and understand them I never think of painting as a cathartic thing but I definitely think it's a way of processing things and that one is so such a cliche to say that we're over blown with images all the time but of course more than ever when you can see 300 images before you get out of bed in the morning if you care to so definitely the way I see the world is in a very fragmented or recently I've been thinking it more like everything shattered you know everything's in splintered and shattered there's a physical way that the painting is made drawing partly on the things around me in the studio and in fact we've included a big case of my source material and mostly things that are straight off the studio floor some of which I've had for twenty years just kicking around and I just said that looks like the contents of my brains you know student before me a lot of images I've used many many times and that feed into the work both directly and indirectly like I very rarely hold an image in my hand and look at it as I paint anymore and there were some of the works in the earlier in the show I used to do that much more I've have specific images in front of me of other paintings while I worked I still do it a bit now with photographs but mostly I just have things lying on the floor and let them enter in in a kind of peripheral way I also draw a lot so I think of drawing as a way of sort of getting information and really learning to understand imagery so if there's an image I'm drawn to I would draw usually copy it many times you know whether it's an ink or charcoal or watercolor and then I don't really ever look at the drawings again well certainly not what I'm painting but they're in the room at the same time I mean I might come in in the morning and draw so the central image in the where-when is psychologically it's based on a photograph a news photograph it's famous now of a woman being arrested on the beach in South of France and there was many incidents like this I always say arrested and I'm not 100% sure if she was arrested but she was warned that she had to take off her bikini because she was wearing too many clothes on the beach in France so it's a very disturbing and upsetting series of images of a woman who innocently thought she could go and have a nap on a sunny day on the beach and you see the cops sort of surrounding her so it's just a very violent image and seems very eloquent about our times and it's obviously a sort of shocking story on so many levels which I don't know if I should go into here I mean I think they're mostly obvious like about freedoms and you know as a feminist the very idea that we're still you know people are still trying to tell women what they can do with their bodies with their appearance obviously it's more the appearance makes it sound superficial but you know to be told we're sorry but your appearance is not right for this Beach and especially ironic in a country that has Liberty in its motto so I'd copied these images quite a few times and then they fed very much into this painting and you have a lot of bystanders around and a lot of bystanders because exactly there are a lot of bystanders in the picture and that's in a way one of the things that makes the series of images so disquieting is that these white tourists are all just sitting around observing and they look I mean I hate to judge I don't know what they're thinking and I don't know what they were saying and it could be that they're looking disgusted because they're disgusted by what the cops are doing but somehow it reads or I read it as if there whatever there is they seem complicit because they don't seem to be taking action now I would hate for one of the people in that photograph to see to hear me say that and say but I was saying this shouldn't be happening so I don't know but in a still image you know we can't tell what was going on they appear as complicit voyeurs and voyeurism has been a huge part of my work in a way I've always if you could go through the exhibition and see there's nearly always a watching figure from the very beginning and the early bunny paintings that was always about the fact that there was a spectacle which it was sort of bunny being raped and that these watching animals weren't doing anything about it or they were maybe even enjoying it and then there have been a thought of Susanna and the elders a lot in my work and again people spying and there's the Gustin kind of ever watching I so you could sort of it's a whole theme in my work as the voyeur being included within the painting I do think one of the reasons I'm a painter is that I I want to respond to the things I've seen and when I look at the paintings that I love or any art but I suppose specifically paintings by it from people from all generations or all through history I'm looking as a kind of magpie and I always wonder how did they do this I mean one of partly I'm looking as a technician and I'm always thinking how did they do that and then I think you definitely it's again you're sort of processing things but you definitely some sort of want to answer to that I never liked the idea that you're taking on the past but that you are you know of course you're feeding off it and I wouldn't be so vain as to say giving back but the some of the urge to do it is is it to be in a conversation with other paintings and painters but to go back to the subject of this painting because I don't want having said it's got many stories so there was the photograph of the women women and nice and you can see there were two central figures who are no longer directly from the photograph but they basically represent those two women and Anders code the curator pointed out that these two central figures look a lot like masaccio's Adam and Eve being the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and well ever since he said that I've sort of thought yes that's what yeah that's what I was thinking but they definitely have this feeling that these figures are being expelled and I really like that idea that they are sort of being pushed off and those two women you know while I'd paint things change a lot but at the beginning was the idea of a veil being removed but there's also this woman almost looks like she has a veil of paint over her eyes so she's kind of unseeing you'll see there are two main phases that the clearest faces in the painting and that's sort of quite ghostly they're very almost barely there so there's an almost like they're on their way to being invisible in a way there's all these layers of things being hidden and things being concealed and that in itself imitates the way I paint I mean I don't I never think of myself as hiding imagery but things get hidden as you go on I don't try and hide it as I think a lot of people think but just the more you paint of course what was there before it gets concealed and in a way the last couple of years and especially in this painting there's more a sense of showing the way it was made so sometimes there's less paint than before and sometimes there's they seem a bit more considered in some ways that there's less just buildup of layers and layers of paint but more scraping away at the beginning so it's more like veils of paint and things are you know I think it came a lot from doing watercolors and doing large watercolors they fed into the big paintings and this idea of putting down washes of color at the beginning and then sort of taking it off again and letting the figures emerge very naturally and I think it's important to say that the there's a composition it all emerges very naturally there's not an overall there was no overall scheme in my mind of how it would look you know I do almost always end up putting my figures somewhere near the middle which I'd try not to I think I tried to move them over and the trouble with you know I start quite quickly so things kind of got placed fairly near the beginning but I try and keep it very fluid the whole time I'm working on it and on this scale you have to be very physical it's very it's almost like a performative thing because you're so and you're basically inside the painting while you're working on it I just want to say one more thing about the content because the third major thing really is the shipwreck and I'd been working from copies of dellacroix and the famous one Jericho a couple of years ago I started doing drawings again you know just as an exciting new subject I'd never worked with before and it seemed very of the moment and there was a sort of urgency to these drawings and then ever since then I started making shipwreck paintings because I basically seized on it as a subject because it sort of got everything that I look for in a subject as you know tumultuous and lots of motion and a crowd of figures and sort of horror and maybe less sweetness than usual because you know I usually want like horror and sweetness but tragedy and drama and but also a great potential is you know sort of feast for the eyes in a morbid way so it's an interesting idea that the painting reflects our society now and how disjointed it is I didn't set out to do that but I do think I mean I'm very very conscious of our time being one of the incredibly sad things about our time I think is how isolated people are and I get so depressed in New York by everyone wearing headphones and not only being on the phone but now that everyone has a headphone I noticed things from day-to-day like moving along the street in New York now you're weaving in and out as usual but when people are wearing headphones they're less aware of you because I feel that there used to be a natural way that people walk down the street where people just naturally got out of the way of each other and now even if they're not bumping into you they run their phone they don't hear you right behind them often I like nearly bump into someone and I'm like why aren't they moving and you realize because they're totally unaware and thousands of times you have an elevator in both my studio and home and you get in and everyone's you know including me sometimes I mean I'm guilty too but you know the phone is obviously the death of society and culture yeah I definitely think there's something to the idea that the figures in the paintings can be seen to be almost unaware of each other sometimes that they're in the same physical space but they're not connected [Music] you

Channel: Louisiana Channel

Views: 113,517

Keywords: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum, art, Cecily Brown, Painter, Painting, Phone, British painter, Where When How Often and with Whom, contemporary society

Id: dCezAlWpCuc

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 03 2018