Curvilinear sweeps of motion in prismatic hues of crimson, moss green, teal and ochre coalesce and unfurl on the surface of Faeriefeller, a recent large-scale example of Cecily Brown’s animated and seductive style of abstraction. The present work is an outstanding iteration from a series of oil paintings begun in 2019 that amalgamate a spectrum of influences, from Victorian fairy painting and Grand Manner portraiture, to the visual languages of Édouard Manet, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and the lyrics of rock-n-roll legends of the 1960s and ‘70s. The present work takes its title from Richard Dadd’s hallucinatory painting The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (1855-64), a nineteenth-century masterpiece in the collects ion of Tate Britain. Dadd’s woodland fairies depicted on miniature scale in the Victorian-era work are here abstracted and blown up to immense proportions on the surface of Faeriefeller, as small nymph-like faces appear and disappear within the rich forest of Brown’s pulsating brushwork. Indeed, on the surface of the present work colour seems to trigger frenetic action in a bold and densely packed composition; in a recent interview from 2020, Brown asserted, “In a way, I feel like the whole thing is driven by colour” (Cecily Brown quoted in: “Courtney J. Martin in Conversation with Cecily Brown,” in Courtney J. Martin et. al., Cecily Brown, London, 2020, p. 90). Faeriefeller is test.mes nt to the sheer excellence of Brown’s mature practice, in which the tension between abstraction and figuration becomes even more nuanced, and her use of colour unparalleled.

The present work is part of a series in which Brown takes up motifs central to Victorian fairy illustrators, including Richard Dadd, Joseph Noel Paton and Richard Doyle, and Faeriefeller’s title and composition directly references Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. In the present work, shots of white and yellow pigment evoke the whimsical white daisies in the upper half of Dadd’s work, while emerald and grass-green brushwork echoes Dadd’s weaving tendrils and foliage. The central figure of The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke is the Fairy Feller himself, who raises an exe to split a large chestnut, which will be used to make the fairy Queen’s carriage. The Fairy Feller is perhaps present in Brown’s composition too, in the spectral face at the centre of her picture. As art historian Jason Rosenfeld explains, “Dadd’s minutely painted and magnified treatment of a patch of forest glade teeming with diminutive characters and freighted with violence could not seem farther from the slashing and explosive forms of Brown’s large canvases, but the demented nature of Dadd’s late art, partly a product of his unstable mind, comes out most poundingly in Brown’s Faeriefeller, in which an Ensorian Greenman-like face occupies the epicenter of the picture” (Jason Rosenfeld, “Cecily Brown: The Painterly Picaresque,” in Courtney J. Martin et. al., Cecily Brown, London, 2020, p. 90). In reading the present work alongside its nineteenth-century precedent, Brown’s swirling cacophony of sage, cadmium red and pink oil paint presents glimpses of the figurative, a flickering quality of movement vaguely suggestive of Dadd’s fantastical woodland scene.

Significantly, Faeriefeller also references the title of the Queen song written by Freddie Mercury, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (1974), which was born out of Mercury’s great appreciation of Dadd’s work. The lyrics of the song make direct reference to the characters depicted in the Victorian-era painting, and to a long poem Dadd penned after its execution entitled Elimination of a Picture & It’s Subject – called The Feller’s Master Stroke. In the poem, and likewise in the celebrated Queen song, each fairy in Dadd’s masterpiece is given a name and a story in an attempt to explain the imagery depicted in the painting. The song was released by the British rock band as part of their 1974 album Queen II. Brown has taken inspiration from rock lyrics and album art throughout her oeuvre, and Faeriefeller recalls Brown’s earlier Ladyland paintings executed between 2011 and 2013, which were based on the cover art of The Jimi Hendrix Experience album Electric Ladyland (1968). She has also titled her paintings in homage to David Bowie, such as Lady Grinning Soul (2015) and The Year of the Scavenger (2012). Brown herself has discussed the influence of song lyrics on her work: “Painting is closest to poetry of the arts; not being able to explain something, why does one thing sound so great next to another? You can’t put your finger on it, that’s what my work’s about” (Cecily Brown quoted in: Jackie Wullschlager, “Lunch with the FT: Cecily Brown,” The Financial t.mes s, 10 June 2016).

Brown graduated from the Slade School of Replica Handbags in London in 1993 and moved to New York permanently a year later. In the mid-1990s she was looking at the work of New York City-based artists Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Christopher Wool, the latter of whom was her favourite at the t.mes , “he seemed to be answering the question ‘How do you paint today?’” (Cecily Brown quoted in: “Courtney J. Martin in Conversation with Cecily Brown,” in Courtney J. Martin et. al., Cecily Brown, London, 2020, p. 90). Yet her more recent work looks back further into art history, and her deeply considered investigation of the threshold between abstraction and figuration builds upon a number of earlier sources, from Arshile Gorky’s abstract landscapes of the 1940s, to Willem de Kooning’s highly gestural representations of the female body a decade later. Faeriefeller is thus imbued with an extraordinary fusion of influences, from Richard Dadd’s Victorian fairy paintings, to Freddie Mercury’s poetic lyrics and the visual language of twentieth-century masters of abstraction. At once kaleidoscopic and immersive, the present work sees Cecily Brown reviving the ambitious field of oil painting and affirming her status as one of the most important artists in the contemporary canon.