Cecily Brown attended the Slade School of Fine Art from 1989-93 after studying printmaking and draftsmanship at Morley College. She moved to New York in the mid-1990s, quickly receiving critical acclaim for her work, which embraces both representational and abstract elements in sensual depictions of figures and nudes. Her works draw on the legacies of Abstract Expressionist artists such as JoanMitchell and Willem de Kooning, injecting her works with a fresh sense of humor, titling them after famous musicals and films. Cecily Brown’s work is collected by leading museums including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Tate Gallery, London.

In The green of the larches, Brown is using an etching technique here called direct gravure, which allows her line to maintain the fluid “brushy” look of her paintings. She paints with ink of a piece of mylar (semi-transparent plastic) which is then placed on a treated copper plate. Once exposed to light, the surfaces of the plate that are exposed harden, then the plate is placed in a series of acid baths that eat away the areas that did not harden, thus transferring the marks from mylar to the plate, and allowing for a broader range of tones than usual.