Acrylic on canvas | The Daily Norm

Jun 3

The Wrestlers (after Courbet)

I adore art, especially the masterpieces of old, and I spend a lot of my time gazing in admiration at the works of the old masters and the more recently celebrated artists of the 20th century. However, of all the works I see, only a few inspire me to recreate the work in my own way. Velázquez´s Las Meninas, Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne and Rubens’ Descent from the Cross are three such works which have recently driven me to paint the old masterpieces afresh, and a few weeks ago, another chance encounter had a similar effect.

It was on Instagram in fact that I stumbled across this most recent inspiration – a work by the French master, Gustave Courbet, The Wrestlers – which the instagram user had also discovered for the first time. Painted in 1853, in the typical realist style for which Courbet was best known, and which saw him break away from the classical genre style of painting which was predominant in the mid-19th century, the work is not one I have seen before, perhaps because it is housed in the Fine Arts Museum in Budapest. But as soon as I saw it on the screen of my iPhone, I was struck by the incredible energy of the wrestlers, and the brilliant realism of their taught muscles, interlinked as they strain and struggle against each other – a fantastically visceral image in contrast with the refined crowds watching them from civilised stands in the background.

The Wrestlers (after Courbet), 2016 ©Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, acrylic on canvas

It didn’t take long for my own version of the image to form in my head, following my new interpretative abstract style with which to give the work a new treatment. I have included some realistic elements myself, in homage to Courbet, but for the most part my reinterpretation is highly abstracted, not least the central figures themselves. This was by far the most difficult element to complete, and it took me some 20+ attempts before I was happy with the final abstract form. Unsure whether to separate the figures, or paint them as one, I latterly settled on a unified form, since the wrestlers in Courbet’s original are so obviously, almost erotically combined into a single star-like figure. The cadmium red colour however was clear as soon as I saw, around the same time as discovering the Courbet work, a photo of a brilliant red Alexander Calder mobile against a green grassy background. I knew from that moment that my wrestlers had to be red, creating a central contrast which is key to the balance of the painting. And so it was born.

Gustave_Courbet_-_The_Wrestlers_-_WGA5462

The Wrestlers (1853) by Gustave Courbet (Fine Arts Museum, Budapest)

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. For more information on the work of Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, head to his art website at www.delacybrown.com

May 23

Shakespeare 400: Richard III

It probably will not have escaped your notice (particularly if you live in the UK) that this year marks 400 years since the death of Britain’s most famous ever playwright and poet, William Shakespeare. And across the country and beyond there has been something of a resurgence of interest in his work. This, together with the coincided discovery of a Shakespearian theatre troupe out here in Mallorca aroused my own Bard reawakening, not least because I have a little anniversary all of my own – some 20 years since I painted, at the tender age of 13, my first ever substantial collection of paintings which just happened to be a scene from every one of Shakespeare’s 37 plays.

So with one thing leading to another, it wasn’t long before I felt old inspirations stir up, and the decision to once again tackle Shakespeare as an inspiration for my art took hold.

Richard III (2016 ©Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, acrylic on canvas)

First off the rack is this painting of one of the Bard’s history plays, Richard III. Painted in my new style, interpretative abstraction, the work appears simple but in fact represents the story of Richard III in three clear aspects. First, the three piles of what one could mistake for bricks or books represents, at the painting’s most simplistic visual level, the “III” of Richard in roman numerals. The second meaning is the allusion to the famous scene whereby the Duchess of York (Richard’s mother), Queen Elizabeth (his dead brother’s wife) and Queen Margaret (the previously exiled wife of the former King Henry VI) meet together and bemoan and curse the Machiavellian rise of Richard III to power.

That rise is finally, and most importantly represented by the same three pillars of blocks, each of which depict an important part of the story: The central column is the staircase which tracks Richard’s bloody ascent through the rungs of power to be King, with the slash of the golden crown shining boldly at the top; the column on the right is the Tower of London and in it the two yellow cubes are the two blond princes, the true heirs to the throne who Richard famously kills in the tower in order to clear his path to the crown; and the column on the left, with its overlapping grey forms like medieval armour, represents the Battle of Bosworth at which Richard was finally defeated.

It seems remarkable that some 20 years have passed since I painted my teenage Shakespeare collection, especially now as I rediscover the same excitement which his plays engendered in me all those years ago. Now I’m looking forward to the challenge of finding them again, and painting them afresh (albeit perhaps not all 37…!).

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. For more information on the work of Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, head to his art website at www.delacybrown.com

Apr 6

Abstract #26: Todos Rectos

I have long been inspired by the Semana Santa parades which fill the streets of Spain with their melancholic processions at Easter time. Too many times I have berated the confusion of ignorant outsiders who see the parades as anachronistic, or worse still, reminiscent of the unthinkable 3Ks. In truth, they make for a stirring spectacle, no matter that their devotional repercussions are undoubtedly far weaker than they might have been 100, even 50 years ago. Yet with the sinister pointed masks of the nazareños, the swinging thrones lifted on high allowing a precious statue of Jesus or the Madonna to make its annual outing into the streets, and their moving brass band harmonies resonating throughout cobbled streets, Spain’s Easter parades are for me a highlight of the annual calendar.

Readers familiar with my blog will know that this will not be the first time I have painted Spain’s Easter parades. They feature in my Seville Triptych, my study of Domingo de Ramos, my Semana Santa code, and my painting Catholicism Catholicism. But these solemn spectacles never fail to move me, and it was during the afternoon in the week immediately preceding the parades that a moment’s reflection on what was to come brought this image sweeping before my eyes. That same evening I bought my canvas and set to work.

Abstract #26: Todos Rectos (2016 ©Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, acrylic on canvas)

Featuring all of the various characteristics of the parades; the pointed hats of the nazareños, the enthroned statues of Jesus and Mary, the candles, trumpets and incense smoke, this new painting encapsulates Semana Santa, with each aspect reduced into an abstract form typical of my new style, and with a highly limited colour palette of deep blood red, yellows and touches of blue.

Asides from the forms, the title of the piece is something of a play on words. Todo recto in Spanish means straight on, like the direction of the parade, led by the trumpet. But to be todos rectos is to be literally all right, referring not only to the moral righteousness of those involved in the procession, but also eluding to the right wing politics with which the Spanish Catholic church was always historically associated. And of course to be recto is also to be straight. Enough said.

It’s a painting with which I am wholeheartedly delighted. A finely balanced addition to my new collection, and the many of my works which have been inspired by Easter in Spain.

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. For more information on the work of Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, head to his art website at www.delacybrown.com

Feb 25

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Barcelona (The Yellow Painting)

I’m on a new road, it’s an artistic revolution, and as part of the journey my art has become abstracted. I have discovered the joys of simplicity, like breathing the freshness of countryside air after years spent in a congested city. Perhaps, now I come to think about it, my new style is the subconscious manifestation of my new life in Mallorca, a freshness of mind which has opened up since my departure from London.

Whatever the cause, my mind is alive with new ideas, and when I recently spent the Valentine’s weekend with my partner in Barcelona, this new painting, simply entitled Barcelona (but better known in our household as “The Yellow Painting”) leapt into life. It was inspired primarily by the textures and experience of our hotel room, whose luxurious black bedspread inspired the black form in the centre of the painting, while the rose is of course the very symbol of Valentines. Meanwhile amongst the simplified shapes, the four spires of one face of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia can be found, as well as the curved square blocks of the Eixample area which predominate the shape of the city when seen from above, and which also appears in the simplified rose.

Barcelona (The Yellow Painting) (2016 ©Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, acrylic on canvas)

But this painting is so much more than what is plainly visible. It is a feeling, a sensation – moments of happiness in a weekend of discovery. When we felt free, and excited, and reinvigorated by the city atmosphere. And its predominant colour – a yellow full of hope – just about perfectly sums up the optimism which this new period of creativity has engendered.

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. For more information on the work of Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, head to his art website at www.delacybrown.com

Feb 19

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Las Meninas: Third Interpretative Exercise

I’m having an artistic revolution, and my head is spinning with shapes and colours. Ever since my last encounter with Velazquez’s Las Meninas last November, a seed has been sewn and new buds of Spring are rapidly taking shape as they shoot forth from my imagination to the tip of my paintbrush.

The latest result of this creative flowering is this, the third in my own Las Meninas exercise, each canvas taking a new approach to painting one step further. While in the second of the series, I reduced the famous figures of Velazquez’s work into simplified abstract forms, but maintained the familiar composition, in this third experiment, I have stripped the painting almost entirely of its compositional values, maintaining only the basic three dimensional construct of the room. As for the remainder, all of the shapes which can be found in the second painting are now displaced, recoloured and fragmented, distributed in an energetic whirl of abstracted movement which is entirely free in its composition.

Las Meninas: Third Interpretative Exercise (2016 ©Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, acrylic on canvas)

Had I come across a work such as this in an art gallery, I may have assumed that it was easy to paint. Yet as this painting taught me, it was far from simple. The delicacy with which a composition of this nature needs to be approached, not just technically (there are an awful lot of straight lines) but also compositionally, cannot be underestimated. I would spend long periods staring at the painting, trying to work out where the next shape should be placed, knowing that one incorrect angle or placement could throw out the entire energy of the piece, reducing the painting into something mediocre, devoid of its own story.

As it is, and with a few wrong turns rectified along the way, I am delighted with the final composition as it turns out. For me it is a composition rejuvenated, a painting which appears to burst before your eyes. And most importantly it retains, for me, some of the key ingredients of Las Meninas, albeit presenting them in an entirely different way.

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. For more information on the work of Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, head to his art website at www.delacybrown.com

Feb 11

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Las Meninas: Second Interpretative Exercise

There are some art exhibitions that you go to that simply have the capacity to strike deep. Many shows are pleasing, others interesting, but then there are those which you remember for ever. I’ll never forget for example Frida Kahlo or Henri Rousseau at Tate Modern, Tamara de Lempicka at the Royal Academy, Dali at the Centre Pompidou or Da Vinci at the National Gallery London. Now to that list I add the Kandinsky retrospective at CentroCentro in Madrid, not because it was any better than the Kandinsky I saw many years before at Tate, but simply because the combination of time and energy and who know’s what combined to leave me utterly inspired.

When, the next day, I walked into the Prado and saw Velázquez’s Las Meninas once again, something shifted in my head, and I left an artist converted.

I started my reinterpretations of Las Meninas shortly after the whirl of the Christmas season was over, and my first, Las Meninas (In Our Time) I shared with you a few weeks ago. But my new project was far from over, and this painting, shared today, was the one which leapt into life before my eyes that day in the Prado Gallery when Kandinsky was still very much on my mind.

Las Meninas: Second Interpretative Exercise (2016 ©Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, acrylic on canvas)

Las Meninas: Second Interpretative Exercise borrows from Velázquez’s composition, but otherwise radically simplifies the forms of his dramatic personæ, and swaps the dark browns and neutral shades of his painting with a vibrant almost pop-art palette. The result is an image which pleases me incredibly. It is at once abstract but recognisable, tidy but surreal. I had great fun in reimagining each piece of the painting – for example painting the dog’s stretched out arm as a bone, and the nun’s head like a piece of sushi – and best of all, I know that this is only the beginning. Abstraction and simplified forms are spinning around my head. Ideas are overflowing, and I can’t sit still for a need to paint.

It’s why I’ll always remember that Kandinsky show, because it switched on a light in my head which has long remained dormant.

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. For more information on the work of Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, head to his art website at www.delacybrown.com

Jan 13

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Las Meninas (In Our Time)

I’m feeling terribly pleased with myself. It’s only the second week of January in a fresh new year, and already I have ticked a new year’s resolution to give more time to my art. For asides from a number of projects started and now pending completion, one new canvas has already left my easel as a finished piece: Las Meninas (In Our Time).

Anyone who is familiar with the great masterpieces of art history will probably recognise the setting of this painting. It is of course based almost exactly on Diego Velázquez’s best-known 1656 work, Las Meninas. And yet this is no copy. Rather it is a statement; a narrative, about what was, and what is. For in my Las Meninas, Velázquez’s room is eerily empty. There is no princess glowing in the light, nor the maids whose assistance to her majesty gives the painting its title. Gone too is the court jester, the dwarf, and the King and Queen in the background. Even Velázquez himself is nowhere to be seen. And it’s not just the figures who are missing: here even the art on the wall is blank and simplified, reduced down to blocks of colour in a room stripped of its majesty. At all that is left behind is a lone object: a ceramic figurine with a price tag, straight out of a souvenir shop.

Las Meninas (In Our Time) 2016 ©Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, acrylic on canvas

I was inspired to paint this work back in November when I visited Velázquez’s great work, for the umpteenth time, in Madrid’s Prado Gallery. Two things struck me as I left the gallery: First, how sadly different are the richly executed wonderfully fine art works that fill the Prado from the art which so called “contemporary artists” seem to produce today. Is our time, I wondered, a time that will ever be noteworthy in the future books of art history? And second, I was struck by the degree to which consumerism and commercialisation dominates today’s imagination. The extent to which the demands of mass production and imitation cause a unique masterpiece like Las Meninas to be replicated in every conceivable form, from key rings, magnets, ceramic figures, cuddly figures, to cushions, aprons, tshirts, and mobile phone cases.

Velázquez’s original masterpiece

So in recreating Las Meninas for our time, my room is emptied of the royal sumptuousness of the past. The figures of history have retreated, and the fine art that adorned the walls is no more. The time of imperial splendour is long forgotten, and all that remains at the room’s centre is the tacky souvenir which commercialises the past; a glossy gift for a present generation so often devoid of the imagination to create unique splendour anew.

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. For more information on the work of Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, head to his art website at www.delacybrown.com

Oct 25

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Introducing my new painting: The Gentleman (in Paris)

For those keen-eyed amongst you, particularly those reading my recent Spanish posts and my various tapas recipes, you may have noticed (as I know a couple of my regular readers did) in the background in the garden of my Marbella house stood a little easel and upon it a small canvas – from the early photos, when just a blank canvas was present, to the latter shots which showed me making some progress on the work as the balmy days of my holiday whiled onwards.

A canvas awaits me – in my garden in Spain

As the idea developed, and owing to the sad reality that our holiday was only 9 days long, my painting became more compelx, and when I left Marbella, the work was only half done. Luckily the canvas fit in my case (although no doubt contributed to my excess of baggage weight for which the ever unreasonable British Airways charged me a 50 euros flat penalty fee, even though my partner’s luggage was massively underweight) and I continued work in London. Be my life in London as it is – full of work and busyness, it has taken me some time to complete the painting, even though I rushed home most evenings to fit in a few hours of work.

However, having had last weekend to myself, I finally managed to complete the work, a work which I now call The Gentleman (in Paris).

Inspired by the icons of a time I hold dear, a yesteryear when men were gentlemen, when to go out to dinner was a time of dressing up in a top hat and gloves, when chivalry was at the forefront of society and manners were a thing held in the highest of esteem. It was a time when in a Gentleman’s study, such as this one, a Chesterton desk chair would be found amidst the paraphernalia of a professional’s equipage: a pipe, a magnifying glass, a pocket watch, some butterfly specimen and an emerald green desk lamp, an expensive fountain pen and even more expensive culinary delicacies such as lobster and oysters, all set against a black and white floor, a hefty wooden desk, rich damask green wallpaper, verdant plant life and a floor to ceiling window view of the Paris chimneys beyond. And of course, because it’s Paris, the Gentleman has to keep up with the French news in Le Figaro. Meanwhile at the heart of the image, representations of the Gentleman himself: his top hat, a bowtie and wing-collared shirt, and his face, masked in the enigmatic disguise of a masquerade ball.

Explaining this painting is a little like explaining one’s impulses. This is an image which came to my mind in Spain which always provides me with sufficient relaxation and creative stimulation to get my artistic juices running. And even though the resulting painting is far from Spanish, it nonetheless digs deep in my imagination, placing on canvas a time, a place with which I can feel an inexplicable evocation, like an experience which recalls the strongest of emotions, even though it never happened. In this way, I use painting to make sense of the deepest of subconscious sentimentality, helping me to both explore myself, and pay homage to the depth of my creativity.

I leave you with a few shots of the painting’s details. I hope you like it.

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Jun 17

Sunday Supplement: St Ives

We Brits are so accustomed to heading down to Gatwick and jetting out to the Mediterranean, the French Countryside or the Aegean Sea for our summer holidays that we forget what we have on our doorstep. It’s not that we can be blamed – look at us now. Mid-June, almost the longest day, and last week we had temperatures in the region of 12 degrees. Last Monday in fact that skies were so dark as they spouted out a continuous torrent of abusively heavy rain that I felt as though apocalypse had fallen. However on the rare occasion that the weather actually behaves in correlation with the seasons, England can do summer holiday like each of its European neighbours.

I love my photo of old women on a bench – so marvellously English

There’s nothing quite like an English summer – Pimms in the garden on a setting sun, when the grass goes slightly dewey and the sunlight dapples on the dinner jackets and ballgowns of attendees to Glyndebourne Opera, or open-air Shakespeare in Regent’s Park; picnics under willow trees, next to ponds quietly humming with the sounds of multi-coloured dragonflies dancing across the surface of lily-pads; and the coast. The English coast is emblematic of old-school summer holidays, as men took out their handkerchiefs and tied knots in the corners to make a hat providing scant protection of their bald-batches, children risked breaking their teeth on a lump of sticky-sweet “rock” complete with writing running through the middle, and others took up exploring in rock-pools searching for crabs and shrimps and other creepy crawlies which lurk in amongst the rocks and seaweed when our extreme tidal system takes the sea way out beyond the beach.

Yes, this IS English sea!

Together with this tradition, you expect to find plenty of seaweed, lots of rocks and stones and a slightly dull tinge to the seawater, making it altogether a more English, slightly less comfortable affair. But last year when I headed down to Cornwall, right at the bottom of our fair nation, I was flabbergasted by the site of such a stunning coastline, with such sapphire-sparkling crystal-clear turquoise waters that I could have been in the Caribbean. No wonder then that the little harbour town of St Ives has proved such an inspiration to generations of artists (Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson being two foremost examples of modern times) that the world-famous Tate Gallery has set up an outpost there.

Well when I stayed last year, I too became inspired by the burst of very mediterranean colours that were all around me and, when I was, ironically, sat in the garden of my family home in Spain on the Mediterranean itself, I took to my canvas and recollected the beauty of what I had seen in Cornwall a few weeks before.

My painting of Cornwall uses a simple colour palate with fresh oranges, greens and purples, while the turquoise qualities of the sea are reflected in all their beauty. I’ve introduced something of a cubism element when tackling the many rocks which frame the coast and most unusually of all, I’ve actually painted an impression of how the light dappled upon the canvas when I sat painting it in my parents’ garden, with the light cast through the intricate mesh of the jasmine tree. In this way I have forever captured a St Ives imbued with the light of the Med where I was inspired to paint it.

In addition, take a look at this little gallery of some of my photos from St Ives so you can see what inspired it.

: Yes, this IS English sea!

: I love my photo of old women on a bench – so marvellously English

Have an amazing Sunday.

© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.