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Lot Essay
"When I saw Auerbachs thickly textured surface...it was a cratered and pitted surface over which the eye travelled, from one event to another ...I worked on the underlying drawing, manipulating it, stretching, rotating and cropping it as if it were a skeleton of the work or an armature. Onto this is then applied an almost monochromatic base of two or three colours, which I then start working with, sometimes obliterating all the initial painting. In the last month or two of working on the painting, there will be no reference to the reproduction of the original painting, although plenty of reference to other painters will be made...from Paintings by artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Henri Fantin-Latour, Sir Edwin Landseer, Marlene Dumas and many others. So they become real subjects.
"I spend my time trying to breathe life into these empty vessels, which is how I perceive the Auerbachs (not that his paintings are empty vessels in themselves). The part that I take from them is the dead bit, and I re-enliven it into something completely different. Something that has personal illusions to my own life, onto which I can project personalities of people that I know...Things that start to happen in the work...the way the head starts to change position as I am painting, for example, will make me think of a work by another artist and I will go and investigate that. Perhaps by looking at another artist it will change the way I continue painting. It's free-form painting in a way it certainly wasn't before. As time goes on, the three dimensional space around the figure becomes more important, more highly developed, and redefined by me. I also don't think people understand that this is how they are made, because the end product doesn't describe it. The final painting hides its origins, which is exactly how I want it. A modernist way of working would show the underlying structure of something. I don't do that." (Brown, quoted in 'Last night I dreamt that somebody loved me', an interview with S. Hepworth, May 2000, in Glenn Brown, vol. I, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan 2000, pp. 65-66).
"I spend my time trying to breathe life into these empty vessels, which is how I perceive the Auerbachs (not that his paintings are empty vessels in themselves). The part that I take from them is the dead bit, and I re-enliven it into something completely different. Something that has personal illusions to my own life, onto which I can project personalities of people that I know...Things that start to happen in the work...the way the head starts to change position as I am painting, for example, will make me think of a work by another artist and I will go and investigate that. Perhaps by looking at another artist it will change the way I continue painting. It's free-form painting in a way it certainly wasn't before. As time goes on, the three dimensional space around the figure becomes more important, more highly developed, and redefined by me. I also don't think people understand that this is how they are made, because the end product doesn't describe it. The final painting hides its origins, which is exactly how I want it. A modernist way of working would show the underlying structure of something. I don't do that." (Brown, quoted in 'Last night I dreamt that somebody loved me', an interview with S. Hepworth, May 2000, in Glenn Brown, vol. I, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan 2000, pp. 65-66).