Brown, Glenn
Glenn Brown's paintings are based on reproductions of paintings by other artists, including Salvador Dali, Willem de Kooning and Rembrandt. 'Decline and Fall' is based on a portrait by Frank Auerbach, one of the senior figures in British art, whose painting is remarkable for its exceptional thickness of paint. Glenn Brown says: 'When I work from thick surfaced paintings.... they've almost all been portrait heads. In all of them there was originally a model sitting in a chair in the studio who gets characterised by the artist. He finishes it and it gets photographed. Then the photograph gets turned into print, which gets put into a book. I get that book and do my painting from it. Through those stages, the original person gets further and further back. Further and further lost, further removed. The whole notion that there was a character underneath the image kept me wanting to do them. It was that sense of loss, as if they were ghosts.'
Ann Jones
Decline and Fall
1995