Having moved from London to New York in the mid 1990s, Cecily Brown has a studio in Manhattan from which she creates painterly paintings, some with elements of landscape. Much of her early work had overtly sexual imagery, but her painting in the early 21st century verges on the pastoral although she says she has an ongoing interest in the figurative.

Brown was raised in a suburb of London by her mother Shena Mackay and Robin Brown whom she thought was her father. But later she learned that her father was David Sylvester, British art historian and critic, whom her mother often took her to visit. He and Cecily became close friends, and when she was 22, she learned from her mother that Sylvester was her father.

She attended Slade School in London and took lessons from the painter Maggi Hambling and also used his studio. She began her paintings with sexual themes, but felt like a misfit in London. In 1994, she moved to New York and took a job as an animator for a commercial film maker. In 1997, she had an exhibit of her early signature works with raucous color and copulating bunnies. From there she moved to erotic imagery with humans.

She is also working on monotypes and creates drawings based on Old Master paintings.

Source: ARTnews, June 2002