Drawing : Cecily Brown's Shipwreck drawings at the Whitworth

Sunday 11 March 2018

Cecily Brown's Shipwreck drawings at the Whitworth

I was over in Manchester this week and finally had a chance to catch up with the Cecily Brown Shipwreck drawings exhibition at the Whitworth. The exhibition is on until the 15^th of April so those of you thinking of going to see some drawings over Easter could easily fit this exhibition in.

The drawings were framed in deep set box frames and glazed behind glass, so please forgive the quality of the images, it is always hard to avoid light reflection when trying to record things behind glass.

Cecily Brown is a very interesting artist, in particular because of her often quoted desire to work in that gap “where figuration and abstraction meet”. She is in this instance working from a series of old master paintings, all of which address the horror of death at sea. Her practice could be described as a deconstruction of the past in order to re-imagine images for today. Her paintings come out of an iterative process of drawing and re-drawing from selected images from the past, a process she continues until she is able to internalise the information taken from the pictorial constructions she is confronting.

She attempts to bring an old tradition of history painting back into the present tense by interrogating figure relationships, highlighting selected rhythmic passages and the way line can cut through colour in different compositional variations or by exploring how marks can re-energise themselves when uncoupled from the preciseness of the original contours of form.

Gericault: The Raft of the Medusa

Delacroix: Christ Asleep During the Tempest

Delacroix: The Shipwreck of Don Juan

The images she has drawn from are very familiar; Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa of 1819, Delacroix’s ‘Christ Asleep During the Tempest’ of 1853 and ‘The Shipwreck of Don Juan’ from 1840. These paintings being not only icons of French Romanticism but perhaps still of resonance because of the fact that the continuing migrant crisis keeps us aware of tragic deaths at sea.

I have tried to deal with the subject myself and realise how difficult is to make images that resonate with a contemporaneity and yet at the same time tap into the deep roots of human history. Brown’s approach is to do this by trying to find the motion of being in a rocking, wave tossed small boat in the movements of people, and to find these movements in classical paintings. The artist is trying to extract the human tragedy from these images by focusing on how bodies shape themselves as they engage in tragic events. According to the British Red Cross, approximately 5,000 asylum seekers arriving in the UK each year are resettled in Greater Manchester, and from my own experience when talking to refugees arriving in Leeds many of them will have at some point have had to cross the Mediterranean in small not very sea worthy boats.

Cecily Brown has stated that her drawings are an alternative “way of approaching a deeply difficult subject”. Subjects of this sort are emotionally charged, and sometimes it is useful for an artist to tap into the resources of history in order to avoid simply hand wringing or emotive bluster. The references to other lives at other times in many ways giving gravitas to her response and providing a network of connections that can help an observer come to terms with a continuing aspect of the human condition.