What Makes Glenn Brown's Work Truly Special?

Glenn Brown is a British artist, a painter and sculptor, who is known for reproducing iconic paintings of centuries past. Under normal circumstances he would be considered a fraud, a forger, but Glenn Brown is an unusual man. Brown believes that humans beings, animals, and objects, constantly undergoes a lifetime of metamorphosis. In an interview with Elena Cue from the Huffington Post, he says: “We all transform from one thing to another, we are all made of stars; the atoms that we’re made up of are billions of years old and once formed parts of stars. So it’s that idea that we are all eternal, to some extent. It doesn’t matter what form we take. We never truly die; we just transform continuously. I think that is also the essence of what it

In order to answer that question, one must delve into the world of color. As shown throughout his art, Brown focuses on color and fluidity. Brown’s desire is for one’s eye to move about the page, for them to question the colors within the piece. In the interview with Elena Cue, Brown was asked, “What meaning do you give color?” In his answer he described how he “steals” color from other artists while explaining how opposite or different colors in a painting create a different but real reality. By painting opposite colors onto the canvas he heightens reality. This effect is achieved because the color reminds the viewer that what they are looking at is not reality, but a painting created by Glenn Brown. An example of one of these paintings would be, Die Mutter des Künstlers (2016). This panting is a reproduction of one of Delacroix’s paintings in which he painted a model known as Mademoiselle Rose. In the original she is performing a basic pose while seated on a block, whereas Glenn Brown transforms her into a ghostly figure. In this painting he crops her the block and her head, dulls the background, and casts the entire picture in a seemingly ethereal blue. The physical changes to the model and the color of the painting severs the connection that the painting once shared with reality, creating a space where the viewer is faced with fiction and