Tiny dancing figures that are made of light; a daisy-chain intertwined with a delicate snake-skin; tufts of sheep's wool caught on a leafless branch; a misshapen pomegranate; an aurora of flames; a blurred angel: Elaine Brown's work deals with the ephemeral, but in a manner that is both rooted to lived experience and imbued with memory. Intricate and precise, at first viewing the paintings appear fragile and shimmering, the objects depicted only moments before they disappear entirely. But, in fact, these are deeply resonate works that use a large and painterly range of reference from Spanish still life of the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century's infamous fake fairy photographs and beyond.
When Brown paints textiles - a sock, a chemise, a piece of lace - the object becomes illuminated, as though inhabited by the spirit of the person it belonged to. The intimate tracery of brushstrokes is at once unearthly and ruthlessly down-to-earth, spiritual and plainly domestic. Her work embodies the contradictions and frustrations of what it means to be female, in particular, to be a woman with young children, trapped by domesticity yet at the same time enthralled by its very trappings. Brown is the mother of two girls and the works completed in the period since the birth of these children (1997 and 2000) are deeply engaged with this aspect of her biography. Her paintings of fairies - smeary, obscure, precise and deranged - as well as her tiny canvases of bullet-like pink swaddled babies revivify the inventory of girlhood: girls and their delight in and fear of fairies, girls and their alarmed and alarming interest in dolls and babies.
On linen, aluminium, or board, Brown uses a range of traditional techniques to render her finish, for example gesso worked into MDF, or layers of wax used to create a surface that is neither matte nor shiny. In 1997 Brown began to paint flowers with a still life of her own dried wedding bouquet, followed by a rose wreath painted after her father's death two years later. Since then roses, peonies, and daisies have recurred throughout her work, often dried or over-blown, beyond their best. Brown often returns to the same objects in her work, re-working, re-making, re-imagining. Her most recent work includes a series of small paintings of ghostly figures arranged as though in a formal studio portrait; her source material here is old family photos, group portraits and snapshots from the first half of the twentieth century. This shift from objects to people is significant, though the shapes and forms remain elusive, not quite fixed.
All these works are possessed of a subtle and yet highly charged eroticism, almost too refined to pinpoint or describe. With the paintings of clothing and textiles it is the sense of a warm body having recently departed the scene that helps create this sensation; with the doll's quilts, bird's nests and other objects it's something more sinister and uncanny; with the juxtapositions of snakeskin and lace, or snakeskin and daisy-chain, it's the opposition of the masculine to the feminine, the wild to the domestic.
The works are at once translucent and hard-edged, and this combination is part of what makes Brown's paintings both sensual and disturbing; it is what gives them their remarkable beauty.
Kate Pullinger
Summer 2008
Kate Pullinger writes fiction for both print and digital media; she is Reader in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University.