Contemporary artist Cecily Brown visited Barrie’s Georgian College in 2012 and delivered a stimulating artist talk. She was an inspiration for all us art students. Brown enlightened the audience on her art making process. My favourite piece of advice she offered was never to forget the corners in a painting, something that now I am always aware of when creating.
Recently I read an interview with Cecily Brown by Julie L. Belcove from the website Vulture.com, After Gagosian, Cecily Brown Hits Reset: Smaller Paintings, Smaller Gallery, Evil Mice and Male Nudes. http://www.vulture.com/2015/05/cecily-brown-gets-small.html The article examined Cecily Brown’s move from large to smaller scale works. Though I am not actually making smaller paintings for this show, I found this article interesting since I normally paint large works, yet have been reduced to merely 1 to 5 inches of rock canvas. More pertinent to this blog however is her interesting view of mice. When describing her thought process as she paints she comments, “Sometimes I’d get really into them almost in this hallucinatory way. I’d be thinking, Here’s the little crowd of evil mice. I could sometimes step back at the end of the day and be like, Where are the evil mice? I’d deliberately not get back from them and look, then at the end of the day be like, Whoa!” As well as her creative process, I guess we now have some insight on how she views the little critters!
