“To me some parts of a painting appear as if you’re looking down at them from an airplane window; others might evoke something that you’re very close to which is out of focus, and maybe this is interlaced with forms that feel very distant, and crisper. The objective is to knit wildly varying perspectives into a unified space. Because of the way light reacts to the metallic paint, the paintings change as your physical relationship to them changes. I like the unstable situation that depends on the light and the viewer both moving around; the painting changes before your eyes. They’re impossible to photograph—there’s no “accurate” image.”
Jacqueline Humphries in conversation with Cecily Brown, “Jacqueline Humphries by Cecily Brown,” BOMB Magazine, April 1, 2009.

Willem de Kooning, Black Untitled, 1948. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Art © Willem de Kooning Foundation.