ARTIST INTERVIEW: VINCENT BROWN
Vincent Michael Brown
Please introduce yourself. What initially inspired you to become an artist? Why did you decide to transition from illustration to fine art?
My name is Vincent Michael Brown, and I am a Bristol, UK, based fine-artist, musician and composer, specialising in figurative painting, predominantly portraiture.
I have always been a very creative person with an interest in many of the arts. A passion for painting formed even before I could write, as I does for most children, only it has never left me. Relationships and especially friendships have always been a struggle, and I have always found comfort through creating with both art and music. I began taking commissions for pet and people portraits at the age of eleven, as well as selling paintings in local amateur exhibitions, but it wasn’t until my early twenties when I married that I decided to try to forge a living with my art instead of music, as performing was forever taking me away from home and I now wished to start a family. For the first two years I had to subsidise my income by taking illustration commissions, but in 2004 after portrait of my father was selected for the world-famous BP Portrait Award at the London, National Portrait Gallery, I gained much media attention, also many sales and commissions, enabling me to concentrate solely on fine art. I have now been a professional artist for more than twenty years, my paintings are in museums and personal collections, I have won awards and exhibited in many prestigious exhibitions throughout the world. My work is currently showing along side Picasso, Klimt, Warhol, Hockney and more.
Why do you find the human figure fascinating to paint? What is the key to capturing a likeness?
There is an immediate sense of achievement when a person recognises the sitter from a portrait painting or drawing, and that was maybe why I responded to the challenge as a child.
Accurate draughtsmanship is the key to capturing a superficial likeness, and this can be learned by anybody, but, a more advanced portrait will capture something other than simple superficial accuracy. If you examine the work of great artists such as Frank Auerbach or Maggi Hambling, they often show far more than a photographic likeness will, with character and atmosphere predominately of greater importance. I see little point in producing a painting or drawing that is simply intended to be a photographic likeness. Although I greatly admire the skill involved in hyper-real portraiture, I prefer to see more of the artist within the work. Photorealism requires only patience and persistence along with the motor skills to place the brush where you intended. Some of my work has been mistaken for hyper-real at a distance, but even my most detailed work is full of expressive brush marks and never just a copy of a photograph.
I always tell my students that the first step is to really look, it sounds obvious but beginners often take a glance at the sitter and then work for a long time from their imagination or memory not really capturing what they’ve actually seen. The second step is to see, and really truly seeing tone, colour and form is much harder than it sounds. Students often work in a linear fashion and would draw an outline for an eye and even eyelashes even when these are hidden by shadows and not really visible.
Artists’ parents after Dix
Medium: Oil and Acrylic on board
Size: 60(h) x 60
Winner of The Holburne Dukes Portrait Award
Exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists The Mall Galleries London
What motivates you to paint? Where do you feel most inspired?
I am uninterested in art as decoration, or the idea of producing works to simply look pretty on a wall. I often attempt to produce something more than just a painting, with art that about the artist, the sitter and the world, always reaching for something beyond my grasp and ability. I am never fully successful in achieving my aims and never satisfied with the result, and that is maybe why I move forward into the next piece. There are often elements within my best paintings that encourage me to believe in the unattainable. Lucian Freud remarked the he wished his ‘paintings to be the sitters, not of the sitters’, and a great portrait most certainly has its own life, and every work is a self-portrait to some extent, with the best art being emotionally exposed and overtly personal, therefore, often only regarded favourably by a smaller percentage of people, yet if the viewer feels anything, even if negative, it is an achievement.
I have certainly become quite numb regarding praise or criticism and prefer to rely upon my own judgment as to an artworks achievements or failures. It has almost always been portraits that intrigued and inspired me the most. The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan Van Eyck, Rembrandts self-portraits, John Singer Sargent, Laura Knight, Ruskin Spear, David Hockneys large double-portraits from the early 1970’s and more recent work, Peter Blakes portraits, also Andrew Wyeths’ Christinas World, Grant Woods’ American Gothic, paintings by Lucian Freud have been a major influence along with Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon, also contemporary artists, Stuart Pearson Wright, John Curin and not forgetting the great Jenny Saville.
Tell me about your process from start to finish for creating your most recent painting. How did you establish the composition? What is the narrative?
I have a notebook where I often jot or sketch ideas for paintings. Many times I will have an idea or image form in my mind at the moment in between waking and sleeping. That to me appears to be the most productive imaginative time. Many of the ideas never amount to anything or may wait around for years, even decades before they become paintings. There are several themes that recur often such as love, relationships, sorrow and personal experiences. Two such themes and the subjects of a most recent work is homelessness and the self-portrait. Virtually all of my non-commissioned work has an autobiographical element, I believe in painting what you know, also I have recently been interested in the work of Cindy Sherman and her photographic character self-portraits. I have been deeply affected by experiences of homelessness and have tried developing portraits of homeless people, but something about this always felt slightly exploitative rather than highlighting an issue of importance. By using myself as the model I intended to show an autobiographical self-portrait and bring attention to the theme without exploiting an individual person.
The last time I became homeless, I was already a father and responsible for my four-year old son and pregnant wife. Our home had become unsafe for us to live in, and through no fault of our own we were in an emergency situation.
I had recently exhibited in the BP Portrait Awards and also featured in many newspapers, however, we didn’t have any money. Lots of these shows expect you to pay a submission fee to enter, pay for your work to be delivered, pay for your work to be framed, and if you don’t win any of the prizes, you can find yourself paying out with nothing coming in. I am still so very grateful for the assistance of the homeless charity ‘Shelter’, without their help I don’t know what may have happened. Thanks to Shelter, we lived for more than six weeks in a one bedroom B&B until we found somewhere new to live. I have since organised fundraising charity events to repay the charity for its help. Many people who have been fortunate enough to not experience this kind of situation find it hard to empathise. ‘Its only a short distance from the penthouse to the pavement’ (Kirsty MacColl Song).
For this painting, I had a rough idea of composition but took some time searching images and videos to confirm what I wanted to show and omit within the work. My studio is situated on the top floor of an 18th century brass pin factory, and the front doors and stonework made a perfect back drop. I took many photographs for reference and Photoshopped a composite image for reference. I usually use MDF as a substrate, but this painting is acrylic on plywood. After gesso priming in white, the painting was first mapped out in brown and white, a technique known as brunaille, or dead colouring. (Left picture) The actual colour I use is a premixed colour consisting of black, crimson and yellow ochre, and is probably closest to a sepia colour. I find greys too cold and browns too warm, and so somewhere in the middle feels right.
Once satisfied with the tonal values, the colour was added in thin translucent layers of acrylic mixed with a glaze medium. (Right picture) My glaze medium is actually a mixture of matt and gloss glaze, with a small amount of retarder to slow the drying time.
I keep my pallet fairly limited, using mainly yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, black and white. Occasionally I use a cadmium yellow and in this painting, also a turquoise. My favourite acrylic brands are Liquitex or Windsor and newton professional.
Finally, I cut the panel, removing inches from the top and bottom, to aid in focusing on the figure.
Which part of your painting process excites you the most?
The idea is the exciting part, that’s also the easy part. Many ideas never get much further than an underpainting or sketch. I like to have something to say within my work, and this can be something so seemingly simple such as the lighting or colour scheme, or composition. Other times I may hide meanings with cryptic clues often rarely or never discovered by others. It has always been disastrous if I have tried to create a work simply with the idea that somebody may like it and wish to hang it on their wall, so much so that, other than portrait commissions, I paint for me. Producing the painting is the hard work to transform the idea into reality.
I have taken many years exploring techniques so that I now do not have to think about technique, but painting takes time, this is unavoidable. Sometimes my work is mistaken for hyper-realism, but this is a mistake. I am inspired by Velasquez, Rembrandt, Millais and like to see colour and brush effects bring life to a subject. Even when I use photographic references I am not trying to emulate the photograph, but rather paint life as I see it before my eyes. If you get close to a painting of mine you will see energetic brush work and juxtaposition of hues, foreground, middle ground and distance are all in focus, elements can be distorted in size just as our mind distorts objects in relation to importance, vanishing points are eliminated or moved according to how they are perceived by a viewer in a scene during the passage of time. It can be a little frustrating when the usual dismissive criticism is thrown my way, ‘it may as well be a photo’, when all I am trying to do is accurately depict my experience of the REAL-WORLD as it appears to me, in a way no photograph I have ever seen has done. I usually respond by pointing out the similarity between the photograph and the real world. I am trying my best to fill the large gap in between where my vision sits.
You're an award winning artist and have had numerous notable sitters. Who has been your favourite sitter to paint, and why?
I am so fortunate to have met and painted many wonderful people. I recently appeared for the second time on Sky Arts ‘Portrait Artist of the Year’, painting Rosie Jones, and she was even more lovely in real-life. I had such a fun time. Some sitters have become good friends, such as Abbot David Charlesworth, the Abbot of Buckfast Abbey. A lovely man with a great sense of humour. Obviously, the three Aardman Animations Directors and co-founders were a privilege to paint, being such a fan of their work.
A Supper at Aardman
Medium: Acrylic on poplar plywood
Size: 124(h) x 98
Winning Commission for The Holburne Dukes Portrait Award
Collection of the Holburne Museum, Bath
Which piece has been your favourite to work on, and why?
My all-time favourite of mine has to include my own family. As a young child my son would happily pose for me and was such a great model. I was lucky to have a studio at home and it’s so nice to look back on all of those paintings with him as a boy when he is now in his twenties. Unfortunately my daughter was never quite so keen to pose, and I have much less work featuring her, such a shame as she was a really cute kid but much more shy. My wife has always been the hardest to paint and I have had the most failed paintings of her, but one of the only paintings I’ve been pleased with the result is another emotional charged portrait ‘The Hawthornes II’. The first version was from 2005 and was destroyed by me after being refused for a couple of exhibitions. This second version was shortlisted for the ‘Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize’.
Hawthornes II (self with family)
Medium: Acrylic on Board
Size: 121(h) x 89
Shortlisted for the 2021 Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize
Exhibited at2022 Royal Society of Portrait Painters
Exhibited at the Royal West of England Academy of Art
Who is your greatest artist inspiration? If you could ask them one question, what would it be?
I do not feel it is possible to chose only one artist as my greatest inspiration. There have been so many great artists each with something unique. I find myself constantly discovering great artists and shifting from era to era learning so much from each. Early inspirations were artists such as Rembrandt, Van Eyck, Andrew Wyeth. If I could meet an artist from our distant past, simply to ask a question, I think the most interesting answer would come from my namesake Vincent Van Gogh, if I were to ask him how he felt about the vast sums of money paid for his work. I have a feeling he would give an interesting answer. I’ve always loved the episode of Dr. Who where they take Vincent to a museum in the present day to hear the guide (played by Bill Nighy) talk about how he rated van Gogh in the history of art. I often wonder if artists such as Turner or Rembrandt believed their work would one day receive the recognition it deserved. They were all so capable of painting anything in any style that you have to believe they chose future recognition rather than the immediate by painting the way they did.
What are your future aspirations as an artist?
I’ve never chosen to chase financial success or produce what galleries deal to be commercial work, but a little more economic stability would be good for my family. Having said that, I wish only to become the best artist I can be, and to produce some paintings that have meaning to others in the way so many works have had meaning in my life.
Why do you think art is important in society?
In these troubling times for creatives, where an AI creation can sell for a million dollars, and a banana taped to a wall can also fetch more than my lifetimes work, it can be tempting to say that arts importance has diminished to extinction, but I firmly believe that there are so many works of art the form the pinnacle of the greatest achievements of humankind. When we create art for the sole reason of communicating emotions, love, sorrow, joy, the human condition, this is something AI will only ever be a poor imitation of.
Although, I recently posed the question ‘what is the purpose of art’ to AI and received this fairly decent response… ‘The purpose of art is multifaceted and subjective, varying from person to person and culture to culture. However, some common purposes include:
1. Expression: Art allows individuals to express themselves, their emotions, ideas, and experiences in a tangible form, providing a medium for communication that transcends language barriers.
2. Reflection: Art can serve as a mirror to society, reflecting its values, beliefs, struggles, and aspirations. It prompts viewers to contemplate and engage with various aspects of the human experience.
3. Communication: Art can communicate complex concepts and evoke strong emotions, fostering connections between artists and their audiences, as well as among individuals who share interpretations and experiences.
4. Exploration: Artists often use their work to explore new techniques, materials, and ideas, pushing the boundaries of creativity and innovation while challenging existing norms and conventions.
5. Catharsis: Both for creators and audiences, engaging with art can provide a cathartic release, offering solace, healing, and a sense of connection or understanding in times of joy, sorrow, or uncertainty.
6. Provocation: Art has the power to provoke thought, challenge assumptions, and spark dialogue about important social, political, and philosophical issues, contributing to critical discourse and societal change. Ultimately, the purpose of art is deeply personal and can encompass a wide range of intentions and effects, depending on the perspective of the artist and the interpretation of the viewer.’ - ChatGTP 3.5
