Altered State

"When I work from thick-surfaced paintings--the Auerbachs, the Karel Appel, the de Kooning--they've almost all been portrait heads, in all of them there was originally a model sitting in a chair in the studio who gets characterized by that artist. He finishes it and it gets photographed. Then the photograph gets turned into a print, which gets put into a book. I get that book and do my painting from it. Through those stages, the original person gets further and further back. Further and further lost, further removed. The whole notion that there was a character underneath the image kept me wanting to do them. It was that sort of loss, as if they were ghosts." -- Glenn Brown