Viewing the original canvas through his computer screen and/or books, Brown developed what he called a 'healthy cynicism about what it is to look at the world to be in a modern world surrounded by images'. Brown duly developed a new method of painting that re-worked existing pieces. While studying at Goldsmiths College of Art, Brown became aware of the fact that painting (and expressionism especially) was considered passé. Though it is possible to read the image on its own terms, with this image, Brown - who acknowledges the original painting in his title - confronts his audience and asks them to question their assumptions about fine art and how it is (or has been) judged according to its degree of originality. Taking artistic liberties with Auerbach's original, the colours in Brown's reworked painting have been heightened to take on a hyperrealistic digital glow that lends the image an added aura that verges on the grotesque and monstrous.

What appear to be swipes, streaks and raised smears of greasy oil paint, applied with Frank Auerbach's trademark ferocity, is revealed, on closer inspection, to be a mirror-flat copy. These works, which adopt a looser, more expansive approach, achieve their unsettling aura through abrasive color arrangements that effectively obliterate any reference to other sources.Īll is not as it seems in this tortured portrait of a man his face dissolved into a sea of molten blue and green brushwork. In his later works, Brown moved away from (while not abandoning) his cherished derivative style to pursue a more personal take on the theme of the grotesque and decay.Brown's synthetic color schemes also represented the artist's attempts to produce sculptures made of brush strokes. His preference for glossy polished surfaces and discordant color arrangements, meanwhile, saw him linked with the unnaturalistic Mannerist tradition in painting. Brown's paintings were often characterized by their penchant for sluicing distortion.He sought to fetishize expressionistic brushwork, such as that which characterized the work of the School of London, by flattening the tactile surfaces through finely applied brushwork. Emerging from the late-twentieth-century environment that treated painting with mistrust, Brown developed a special interest in raised impasto brushwork.His artistic concerns lay fundamentally with painterly form and how he might call on the history of art to pursue his interest in addressing the philosophical puzzle of artistic authenticity. Whereas the tendency amongst those engaged in the practice of appropriation was to deconstruct and/or to parody an existing image or set of images, Brown's work tended to be more benign.

Glen brown art