Unmoored From Her Reflection - Cecily Brown at The Courtauld Gallery

[Music] i was imagining that i was friends with like edward manet and vincent and you know ennui and all the others because i was thinking just think of it as a group show you know you're just in a salon with them and like it's not so hard artists are always the same you could just imagine going down the bar with them so that was my kind of trick to think i'm just in a group show with all these guys and if i was their age that would have happened probably [Music] once i started thinking about the composition of the painting i knew i wanted there to be two central figures or two or three you know much clearer figures um sort of almost holding the picture down in the middle and i knew i wanted male figures um partly because i have been painting at male figures a lot but also i thought they just have to be male considering the zillions of female nudes there are in the collection i had been trying to do these male bathers at the time and had been looking at a lot of cezanne vedas but also monk and there's this incredible edward monk um of two foot frontal bathers and these actually come directly from that and i often have tons of like reproductions of things if i find i find images i like online and just print them all out and some i'll end up using to draw from and others not i mean i'm always kind of like that like a magpie of like oh i need a kneeling figure i need a seated figure i need and i'll take them from either my own old paintings or from i always almost it's like a cast of characters like you need someone to doing a certain performing a certain task and so these monk guys came in but they think they are the first frontal nude males i've done for a very long time i mean i had a lot of fun making this painting i always think paintings should have elements of humor and um of thinking who actually were they like was it van gogh and gargan or at one point i thought they looked a bit like freud and bacon and they sort of almost became these um you know archetypal male painters but suddenly they're naked and then that leads to kind of the dejanacio lab because there's another there's a figure in the right hand panel that's basically taken from it's the famous figure in the back of the genacio lab and then there's also a basket of fruit in the bottom right that comes pretty much straight from desonating [Music] the impressionists had always meant a lot to me but i'd never actually worked in a very direct way from them um but i think i mean i remember saying to someone when i was in art school like so weird that they could possibly be seen as shocking because this is what the world actually looks like right like that to me it was realism you know there was a painting by gauguin that i loved a lot when i was a kid when i was at the slade uh nevermoor which is one of the most famous ones of this uh reclining female nude but i've thought more and more in recent years about you know the reality of him going to tahiti and sleeping with these young girls and and i knew i wanted some sort of gogan-esque nudes um but i've been working a lot in the last few years with the idea of sirens and also sort of nymphs like hylus and the nymphs and to the sort of hapless male being set upon by you know deadly females i kind of really love the idea of go gam beset by nymphs and being dragged down to hell perhaps and so there's this um form that looks almost like it could be a cake but then i'd also always thought about how picasso used the thumb as a phallus and that when he'd make paint a palette it was always a super phallic thing so i thought gogan's palette with this big phallic thumb sticking through it and then you can't really see go again himself but it's almost like a very abstracted bearded figure sort of being pushed down by fragmented nymphs but i definitely wanted this kind of moment of conflict and violence without being overly explicit um and then there are my normal quotes that i just can't help like they do look a bit like the degas spartans or you know just various painted figures with their arms above their head you know i feel like it's almost impossible to paint her nude without it somehow referring to another nude in painting so um but i may be slightly upped that knowing where it would be like it's got a slightly classical feel maybe on the left hand side the title actually came from an essay by rachel sloan who's a curator at the courthold i was reading her essay on the bar at the fully version and um this this sentence was just in it unmoored from her reflection and um it just got me thinking and the essay was about something that i actually if i had once noticed i'd forgotten which is that the reflection of the waitress actually has no logic where it is in the canvas right so it's this very magical distancing almost effect and separation and um you feel that in a way it's very tragic painting that there she is stuck moored in you know pulling pints or whatever but in her reflection she's able to sort of leave the room as it were and sort of be sort of out of her body and the fact that her reflection doesn't match up with her physical self so then i just got obsessed with that idea and thought like oh that's what i always do like everything's unmoored in a way although you know but then i'll use a device like the two two nudes to you know fix things but it really is often a question of objects being unmoored from you know that sense of figure abstraction is actually it's only just abstraction it's things as just drifting away from what they sort of represent [Music] it's unbelievably exciting when you know that there's going to be a lot of eyes on your painting and eyes of strangers and if it's a public institution like more eyes than your general little art world audience so i mean isn't that why all artists love showing in museums so that's you know and then it's also a teaching school so i love the idea that there'll be art students looking at it but you know it is out of my hands up to a point that's why you have to sort of say like okay i'm done um send it off into its new life um there's nothing there's no message there's nothing i particularly want to you know get across i mean other than to spend how rewarding it can be to spend time in looking at something um i mean ideally you'd hope that with especially young people or people on school trips you know that they might rather than just walk quickly past things that they might be something there that arrests their attention um and i know the courthouse making a big effort to you know with outreach and making sure that it is very much available to everyone which i think is essential and so exciting that that hopefully a lot of eyes will be on it whether they love it or hate it [Music] you

Channel: The Courtauld

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Length: 8min 18sec (498 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022