The London-born painter Cecily Brown fled Britain just as the YBA mania was peaking. She came to New York in the mid-'90s and soon found herself being catapulted among of the leading stars of the painting renaissance. Her de Kooning-inspired fleshy, luscious and downright naughty works had the art-world bigwigs in a tizzy from the start. Represented by the prestigious Gagosian Gallery since 2000, Brown knows how to use sexuality to get the most out of her canvases. As the great Mae West once said, "Sex is emotion in motion." This couldn't be more true of Brown's paintings and here she elaborates on the theme.
"Over the last few years I've drifted away from the overtly sexual subject matters, then I come back. In a way, what I really want to happen is all this tension, lewdness and ballsy-ness of sexual image without necessarily having to describe the image. It is on some levels the perfect subject to paint if you're interested in painting the figure -- this idea of figures in motion, figures engaged in something emotional and how figures fuse together. So even just in a formal and technical way I've always found it compelling and challenging to carry on.
I'm not someone who can go on holiday and have a great idea. It happens while I'm there in the studio in front of the thing. It's very much there in the moment as you'd have to be during sex. You know, it's one of those rare things where, ideally, it's a perfect fusion of the mental and the physical. If you're not mentally present then the sex is not particularly exciting or good.
I don't think I've ever been physically turned on by one of my own paintings while I'm doing it. But because I used to draw a lot directly from porno, obviously if you're looking at a lot of those materials it's a turn-on and at the end of the day, it kinda makes you go 'hah.'
From the beginning when I started painting, sex made such a good subject because [in the work of] the painters I love from the past there's so much concealed eroticism. In the old masters like Titian and Velázquez, I found white sheets and pale creamy flesh and the way the paint was put on and all the silk, the velvet, the fur -- everything seemed to be hinting without coming out and saying things about sexuality. You can say that it's ironic that I went out and made paintings of huge cocks if I admired things that were subsumed. But I needed to see how far I could push.
The Rokeby Venus by Velásquez and Venus of Urbino by Titian -- all these old master paintings I just find incredibly sexy. And also Francis Bacon's paintings of his lovers, especially the one of George Dyer's back. It's just the most sensual thing. The way the flesh is painted ... it's got this tenderness. There's eroticism, but also this tenderness that makes you just feel he's in love with this guy."
BROWN'S SEXY ARTIST PICKS
COLLIER SCHORR (especially her pictures of wrestlers and
soldiers)
JACK PIERSON
JACQUELINE HUMPHRIES
HERNAN BAS
Brown's new book of monographs in collaboration with the gagosian gallery, Cecily Brown, comes out in November from Rizzoli.
[From top to bottom] Cecily Brown: "Skulldiver 4," 2006-07, courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, copyright by the artist. Collier Schorr: "Lives of Performers (G.R.)," 2003, "Matti Back (There I was...) Ellwangen," 2001, Courtesy of 303 Gallery, New York. Hernan Bas: "A sap, with a sapling," 2006, Courtesy of Victoria Miro Gallery and copyright by the artist. Jacqueline Humphries: "Cruiser's Creek," 2006, Image courtesy of Greene Naftali, New York.
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