de Lacy-Brown

I had not previously encountered Nicholas “allergic to chavs” de Lacy-Brown, since I have the same aversion to The Apprentice that others have to Curb Your Enthusiasm or The Office; too much watching through your fingers and biting your knuckles is required of the viewer.

He was, for the uninitiated, the first contestant to get “fired” from this series, to his evident astonishment; after all, he is, according to his own biography, “undoubtedly a man of many talents”. The talent he has chosen to display on his website is his art. Let’s have a butcher’s.

I’d like to get out of the way a picture that’s pretty good. I don’t think it’s good because of the subject matter, before anyone starts. I like the technique and he actually achieves what he sets out to do.


Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, Cityscape I: London

And there are one or two of Paris and Venice that aren’t bad either, in a 1980s Athena kind of way. See, I don’t want to be accused of being unremittingly negative, it’s so easy to criticise, etc etc. But seriously, what the hell else are you supposed to do in the face of this?


Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, Heartbreak I


Or this?


Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, Sophocles’ Antigone


“All of my portraits say something about my personality, though much of what you may interpret is subconscious and beyond even my intention.” Mmm.


Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, Mother and Child


It swiftly becomes clear that on no account must this man ever be allowed near the human face.


Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, Lara/Her Perfect Smile

For all I know, in the flesh this girl really does resemble a Billie Piper inflatable, in which case he’s an uncanny portraitist, but my money’s on “not”.


For me, one of the most problematic things here is his “La Segunda Guernica”, a rework of Picasso’s, um, “Guernica”, on which de Lacy-Brown has written an essay. The original is, he concludes, “one of the most important artistic works ever produced”, and such is its relevance to today’s political situation that what it really needs is to be redone as a heartfelt response to the Madrid train bombings.


Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, La Segunda Guernica

This guy honestly wouldn’t understand what was misjudged or horribly exploitative about this picture if you sat him down and explained it with simple diagrams and Duplo.

The pictures that unsettle me the most, though, aren’t the obvious lurid clashes of colour or ridiculous imagery, but things like this, which are technically pretty proficient but seem utterly dead. For no good reason that I can pin down, this is exactly what I would expect American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman to paint:


Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, Silver Surfer, Goring-by-Sea

“Nicholas, born in West Sussex, first exhibited at the age of thirteen, with a depiction of all thirty-seven of Shakespeare’s plays which was met with rapturous reviews by local press.” Okay, I’ll stop now, it’s too easy. But I recommend trawling his site for a horrified giggle.

One thing his biography omits is that his name was simply Brown, and he adopted “de Lacy” from his grandmother because it sounded more interesting.

Hat-tip to mippy, whose journal alerted me to the existence of both Brown and his website.