Cecily Brown Interview: Totally Unaware

“The phone is obviously the death of society and culture.” With her powerful painting ‘Where, When, How Often and with Whom’ as the point of departure, the influential British-born painter Cecily Brown here discusses how the sense of fragmentation in her work reflects her perception of our contemporary world. “I never think of painting as a cathartic thing, but I definitely think it’s a way of processing things.” Brown feels that one of the reasons why she became a painter, is that she wants to respond to the things she sees, and she attributes the sense of fragmentation, which pervades her work, to having lived in New York for 25 years: “The experience of living in a very busy city inevitably feeds into the way I see things and understand them.” Her paintings are made by drawing partly on the things lying around her in the studio, and she feels these many different images feed into her work both directly and indirectly. The central image in her painting ‘Where, When, How Often and with Whom’ is based on a