Cecily Brown: ‘I was too shy to talk to all these wonderful kids like Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst’ | coloring

pPeople say Cecily Brown left London in the early 1990s because of youth – as if, she laughs, she wanted to get away from them. “Actually, I had a lot of admiration for the art being made, but I wasn’t in tune with them.” While Damien Hirst was dipping dead animals in formaldehyde and Sarah Lucas was devouring bananas on camera, Brown was using a palette and brush. “There was a feeling in London at that time that if you were a painter, you were a loser. I didn’t feel sad about being a painter in New York.”

You might think, then, that she would return victorious. She was acquired by the huge Gagosian Gallery in her twenties, and has works at MoMA and the Tate. Recent performances include Survey at the Met in New York. Her paintings, slippery, complex canvases characterized by rich allusions and rewarding slow looks, sell for millions, making her one of the most valuable living artists.

But just days before her first major exhibition in her home country, at London’s Serpentine Gallery, she’s nervous. “The thing I’m really afraid of is the critics, because they’ll say it’s overrated. I feel like I have to prove myself. I want each show to be better than the last, and that’s of course not going to happen – it’s not linear. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more aware because I think, oh my God, I’ve been so lucky…” She stopped, fumbled for a piece of paper and a pen, and took a breath. “Sometimes it helps to doodle.”

Brown talks about how she paints: powerfully, her thoughts and opinions reveal themselves before they dissolve, cascading like rhythmic brushstrokes across her dense, undulating canvases. “I tend to wander,” she told me apologetically. We’re drinking tea in the upstairs meeting room at the Serpentine Hotel after looking at the gallery installed below, and although she’s anything but friendly and friendly, I can tell she’s eager to get back to it.

The picture-making combines new and old paintings, as well as modern patterns and graphics, all with a nod to the green and pleasant land of her youth. Inspired by Kensington Gardens, the sinuous paintings are a riot of energy and movement. With streaks of sunlight yellow, clay brown, and spring green, it appears lighter than the early works, as if breathing in fresh air; During the drawing process, she would look at children’s picture books. In the distinctive brown style, recognizable details emerge amid a tangle of abstract strokes before they dissolve: blink and you’ll miss the dog, the tree, the bird box. “It celebrates nature, color and light, but at the same time, there is inevitably instability,” she told me.

Brown, now 56, was born in London, before moving with her family to Surrey when she was a young child. “It was poetic,” she says. “We walked to school, and there was a village green, and it looked like chocolate – at least superficially.” Her mother is novelist Sheena MacKay. At the age of twenty-one, Brown learned that her father was not the man who raised her, but the influential art critic and museum curator David Sylvester. A family friend, he had been taking her to exhibitions since she was a teenager, introducing her to artists including Francis Bacon. He encouraged her ambitions. In 1989 she joined the Slade School of Art.

It is tempting to say that it was Sylvester’s association with great artists that gave Brown the confidence to borrow from them. Throughout her career, she stole colors and details from paintings of the past (as well as books and television), breaking them down and making them new again. I told her it was bold for a young woman to lift parts of famous works of art by famous men. “Yes, I know,” she replied with a girl’s smile. Did you feel bold at the time? “Not at all. When I started looking at art seriously, looking wasn’t enough. I wanted to imitate it as a way of understanding it.” She stops. “Plus, there was a feeling that it was all about being stolen, and I might as well use it.”

She moved to New York in 1994, a year after she graduated. Back home, everyone was talking about the death of painting; Across the pond, people had moved on. “There were a lot of galleries that I felt like I could be a part of somewhere. In London, I would never have been a part of it.” But there was more to this move than the hype around YBAs. “I had a confidence in New York that I didn’t have at home. I felt oppressed by the class system here. You know that line in ‘My Fair Lady,’ about it being impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making another Englishman despise him? At that time, I either felt too posh or not posh enough in every situation.”

Was she also aware, because of who her father was, that she didn’t want to be seen as… “An unwanted child, 100%. If I was with my parents, I could hang out with Nick Sirota or Howard Hodgkin. But if I went to an opening night, I was too shy to talk to all these wonderful kids like Sarah and Damien.”

Despite a warm welcome in New York, when she arrived she tried to ignore her identity as a painter, engaging in videos, photo-based objects, and “terrible collages.” She says that, like most young people, she wanted to do something new. “I think one of the reasons a lot of people don’t end up doing art once they leave art school is the realization that you can’t. You just can’t. I mean, maybe 1% of artists every 10 years do.”

Within a few years, she picked up her paintbrush again, first finding fame through images of fun bunnies emerging from color pools. Orgy images of a more human nature followed, along with classical subjects such as still life and shipwrecks. In the early 2000s, she introduced the English landscape into her work, and the natural world has remained a focus of interest ever since.

I ask her if she still has good feelings about the New York art world. “Oh my God, if you get me started in the art world… It’s very difficult to talk about someone who has profited from absurdity, but I think greed has overcome creativity. There will always be true artists, but what we have at the moment is a very commercial art world where a lot of artists make their work directly for the market. I think sometimes people have forgotten what art is.” She winced. “I’m imagining the comments: Oh, shut up, you’re so spoiled in your cashmere sweater while telling people not to…” she scribbles.

Since moving to the United States at age 25, the longest she has spent outside of Manhattan was the six months she, her husband, and their daughter lived in the Hudson Valley during the pandemic. Will you ever come back to London? “I have a big dream of living in England. When the weather’s nice, I want to move here straight away. But when it’s not… I spent so many hours standing at bus stops in the rain in my youth that I can’t do that again. But I’ve never lived here so empowered. And obviously it makes a big difference, if you can hop in a taxi.”

As for the art scene in London, do you feel part of it now? “Well, the art world has become too much about money. My paintings are expensive, so…” she smiles. “I’m not ashamed to go into a hole anymore, put it that way.”