Glenn Brown: The new old master

On an early summer afternoon, a young girl, maybe 8 or 9, lags behind her mother to take a closer look at a sculpture encased in glass at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

The piece is “Trivial Pursuit” by the Brit Glenn Brown, one of the world’s most distinctive and sought-after contemporary artists, a new master in the tradition of the old masters, but with a twist.

Here, Brown has partially suffocated a bronze casting of a cherubic boy in chunky pastel paint globs, pushing the impasto technique to its physical limits.

“Is this wet paint?” the girl asks no one in particular, moving her face close to the glass. Noticing her mother has moved on, she hurries out of the gallery before an answer comes.

It’s a good question. The paint is now a solid, dry mass, but it sure looks like it’s about to slip off the bronze figure like ice cream into a sticky heap.

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As Brown himself says, his work is full of trickery, surfaces and mediums and time periods often masquerading as something or somewhere else. "Transmutations: What’s Old is New Again," the small exhibit of Brown’s most recent work now open at the Schnitzer until Aug. 19, is a good case study of these visual tricks. On view in an intimate gallery in the cool, dark belly of the museum are seven paintings, as well as the sculpture, drawn mostly from one of the participating private collectors in the museum’s Masterworks on Loan program.

It’s a rare opportunity, as the Masterworks program typically displays individual pieces of many master artists — be it a Basquiat or a Matisse — alongside one another, rather than a series from one name.

“This special exhibition takes us into new territory,” writes museum executive director Jill Hartz in the "Transmutations" catalog. “It is, in fact, the first time we have worked closely with a Masterworks on Loan lender, in this case, the Peterson Family Collection, on the presentation of a single artist exhibition.”

Thanks to the special circumstances, Brown recently came from London to Eugene to inspect his work, which he was creating up “until the last minute” for a February show in London.

Only moments after the young girl puzzles about “Trivia Pursuit,” Brown enters the gallery with a small entourage of museum and art professionals.

“I haven’t seen this painting since it’s been varnished,” he says to Hartz, bending toward the massive (about nine by six feet) black and white oil painting “This Island Earth,” Brown’s dark take on the canonical painting theme of the assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven.

The varnish has certainly helped give the painting, like all the paintings in this show, an impossibly smooth finish, like polished marble — the bristly grooves of a paintbrush nowhere in sight.

“I use very small amounts of paint and I paint very slowly, building up layers of paint,” Brown tells me in the gallery. “You get this idea of this trompe-l'oeil notion of paint and brush marks, lots of trickery is going on. Figurative painting is about trickery. I’m trying to engage the person looking at it to think, how is that made?”

The surface of his work is one of the ways Brown departs from the Old Masters he often mimics. Brown came up through the the YBA, or the Young British Artists, a collective in late '80s-early '90s London, which reared other artist superstars like Damien Hirst and Helen Chadwick through the Goldsmiths fine art program at the University of London. After many critics declared painting “dead” in the mid-'70s, a subset of this brash group of conceptual artists defied the sentiment with a roar of color, cheekiness and shock value.

And while many of his paintings and sculptures have a cheerily grotesque funhouse quality, whether it’s a neon palette or line work as wispy and loopy as smoke, the Old Masters like Rubens, Tiepolo, Rembrandt, and Da Vinci always are present.

Sometimes, they are called out directly. This show features two paintings paying homage to Tiepolo — the 18th-century Venetian painter — “Drawing 3 (after Tiepolo/Tiepolo)” and “Drawing 11 (after Tiepolo)” and one to Bloemaert — the Dutch 17th-century Haarlem Mannerist painter — “Drawing 2 (after Bloemaert).”

Because of this visual dialogue with the past in Brown’s work, he’s often labeled an academic artist.

“Some people use the word academic as an insult,” he says, laughing, “Some people as a compliment, but these days it’s easily used as an insult, but I think if you study color, if you study composition, and if you study the way that the eye moves around the canvas; the way that any painting has to have depth in it, how to use color, form and shape and line and edges to create these sort of effects, then you are being academic. You want to know the rules that make a good painting.”

“I look at Old Master paintings to learn as many of the rules as possible because that’s what artists have done for centuries,” he says. “I like the fluidity of their line. It’s that which I’m trying to borrow especially. The sense of movement.”

Brown motions to the delicate, curling Rococo lines in “This Island Earth.”

“It has a translucency through it, almost like cartoon lines that you get sort of behind Mickey Mouse when he’s running. They give a sense of motion and movement to it. Painting has used that for hundreds of years that idea that a quick mark can give a sense of movement. It’s not new. It’s not confined to cartoons,” he says. “I borrow from anything, whether it’s Disney or Rembrandt or Rubens. I think there are always lessons to be learned.”

Another distinctive aspect of Brown’s art is the titling — typically poetic, or irreverent or narrative — a quality shared with other YBA artists like Hirst. In his oeuvre, artworks have names such as “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above,” “Some Velvet Morning When I’m Straight I’m Going to Open Up Your Gates,” and “Get It On.” In this show alone, you’ll see “Daydream Nation,” “Mother’s Tongue,” and “Poor Moon.”

“My education is very academic and very conceptual. Goldsmiths where a lot of the YBA students went is very conceptual,” Brown explains. “As a conceptual artist, the title gives a lot of poetic meaning to the work. That was always something I was very aware of, that even if you call something ‘Untitled,’ it’s still a title.”

He adds, “It just means the artist didn’t have anything verbally to say about it. As you can tell I have quite a lot to say about painting, so it’s a missed opportunity as far as I’m concerned.”

Take “This Island Earth,” for one. While painting it, Brown was listening to radio and reading about the 100-year anniversary of World War I. He wanted this biblical scene to have the feeling of a trench, of claustrophobia.

“It’s not a happy painting. It’s dark and rather sinister,” he says. “We’re stuck on this island earth altogether and we have to get on with each other because there’s nothing else; for the time being there’s nothing else. I wanted a title that was going to sum up this idea of claustrophobia, because even a planet to some extent can be claustrophobic.”

Hanging next to the grayscale painting, is a swirling punch of color against a somber emerald background; “Daydream Nation,” a portrait of a young girl. The girl’s eyes, an electric arctic blue (think of a white walkers’ gaze from "Game of Thrones"), stare longingly off into space. The title comes from a song by Sonic Youth, an alt-rock band that got its start in the New York underground scene of the '80s.

“I love this idea of this little girl — who was probably a peasant in France in the 18th century, she looks like she might be a maid by the clothes she’s wearing — she might be listening to Sonic Youth and that idea of escapism, the guitar solo and the reverb of Sonic Youth,” Brown says. “Trying to encapsulate that idea of being lost, lost in time and place, and transcending your immediate environment to be somewhere else, because,” waving to her face, “she is somewhere else. She’s lost in her own thoughts.”

The portrait is the perfect encapsulation of Brown’s work, lost in time and place, calling out to different periods in history while resting somewhere else entirely.

Alex Cipolle is an arts and culture journalist who lives in Eugene. Email avcipolle@gmail.com.

Exhibit preview

Glenn Brown / Transmutations: What’s Old is New Again

When: 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday through Sunday; through Aug. 19

Where: John and Ethel MacKinnon Gallery, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art,  1430 Johnson Lane

Admission: $5, $3 for 62 and older and free for members, 18 and younger, students and UO faculty/staff