Cecily Brown (British, active United States, born 1969)
Half-Bind, 2005

Run Time: 2:42
Recorded by Mia Farrell, Museum Educator / February 20, 2020

This is Mia Farrell Museum Educator at the Des Moines Art Center. We are standing before Cecily Brown’s painting Half Bind, created in 2005 and acquired by the Des Moines Art Center in 2006.

The painting is made in a very physical way, with its expansive size, the brush strokes become reaching. At first approach it is a rich, colorful, luscious mass of movement and suggested form. Focusing on individual brush strokes, we can see the color-play; pinks, black, greens, browns pulling through one another and blending. We can feel the gestures and large arm movements as we follow them. At this close perspective it is easy to see the unintentional, the loss of control, abstraction, the playful nature of paint with paint, drips and smears of color. When we spend time or step back we remember the artist and her mind and her intention. Forms and composition reveal themselves; a nude woman’s torso with over worked breasts is elevated in the center, with only the suggestion of a face or limbs, the abstraction around her becomes an overgrown landscape. Faces find us throughout the painting as we find them, layerings of things being hidden and concealed. A dogs head, letters. Playing eye spy with us, “I never think of myself of hiding imagery, but things get hidden as you go on.” Says Brown of her work. “I want to make forms that are either just dissolving or in the process of just becoming something and to play with the relationship between the eye and the brain.” She says.

Cecily Brown, born 1969 in London, moved to New York City in the early 90s, she creates drawings and paintings marring figure, abstraction and expressive mark making. Themes of sexuality, gender, and physical tensions captivate the artist as she renders her work, often in a larger than life scale. Through the time taken and discovery that Brown experiences while painting, the viewer is offered a complex journey to explore, over and over again. Brown explains, "One of the main things I would like my work to do is to reveal itself slowly, continuously and for you never to feel that you’re really finished looking at something."