Christopher Le Brun
Christopher Le Brun is a British painter, sculptor and printmaker. One of the most influential figures to emerge in British art in the 1980s, Christopher Le Brun's work encompasses both symbolism and abstraction, his haunting, often large-scale canvasses with wings, trees and riders, offer images from romantic poetry to the old masters. He studied painting at the Slade (1970–74) and Chelsea School of Art (1974–1975). He has exhibited in many significant surveys of international art, including "Nuova Immagine", Milan 1981, "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture", MoMA New York 1984, "Avant-garde in the Eighties", Los Angeles 1987 and "Contemporary Voices", MoMA New York 2005.
I find this quote by the late Bryan Robertson, former director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London, to be very insightful regarding his work:
"In the last twenty years, Christopher Le Brun has created some of the most beautiful and effulgent paintings made by an English artist in my lifetime: strong paintings, often on a grand scale, with highly specific imagery expressed in a modern equivalent to the grand manner and painted with such exuberant panache that one accepts, almost without question, their extraordinary content. On consistent terms which Le Brun has made uniquely his own, he has created a considerable body of work in large or quite small paintings, with drawings and many engravings of inventive refinement which, put all together, makes a visible and credible world of its own. An intensity of visual concept in its broad sense sustains an oddly relaxed, divergent and exploratory tension derived from the calculated and extremely variable deployment of each brushmark in its placement on the canvas. He offers us a feast for the eye demanded by Delacroix as the first requisite of any painting before it has meaning. Some of the ways in which Le Brun deploys pigment appear to stem from early Guston and, before that, from the late Monet that we encounter in the Musee Marmotton - but the world celebrated by Le Brun in this use of paint stems in essence from the romantic past of poetry, myth and legend." -Bryan Robertson
Christopher Le Brun is a British painter, sculptor and printmaker. One of the most influential figures to emerge in British art in the 1980s, Christopher Le Brun's work encompasses both symbolism and abstraction, his haunting, often large-scale canvasses with wings, trees and riders, offer images from romantic poetry to the old masters. He studied painting at the Slade (1970–74) and Chelsea School of Art (1974–1975). He has exhibited in many significant surveys of international art, including "Nuova Immagine", Milan 1981, "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture", MoMA New York 1984, "Avant-garde in the Eighties", Los Angeles 1987 and "Contemporary Voices", MoMA New York 2005.
I find this quote by the late Bryan Robertson, former director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London, to be very insightful regarding his work:
"In the last twenty years, Christopher Le Brun has created some of the most beautiful and effulgent paintings made by an English artist in my lifetime: strong paintings, often on a grand scale, with highly specific imagery expressed in a modern equivalent to the grand manner and painted with such exuberant panache that one accepts, almost without question, their extraordinary content. On consistent terms which Le Brun has made uniquely his own, he has created a considerable body of work in large or quite small paintings, with drawings and many engravings of inventive refinement which, put all together, makes a visible and credible world of its own. An intensity of visual concept in its broad sense sustains an oddly relaxed, divergent and exploratory tension derived from the calculated and extremely variable deployment of each brushmark in its placement on the canvas. He offers us a feast for the eye demanded by Delacroix as the first requisite of any painting before it has meaning. Some of the ways in which Le Brun deploys pigment appear to stem from early Guston and, before that, from the late Monet that we encounter in the Musee Marmotton - but the world celebrated by Le Brun in this use of paint stems in essence from the romantic past of poetry, myth and legend." -Bryan Robertson
I LOVE his paintings. They are beautifully serene, but also haunting. I love that his brushstrokes remain lose and brushy, but the images are still clear. If I ever find myself at one of his shows, I am sure that I will stare for a very long time at the next two paintings, the first done in 2012, and the second in 2011.
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