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From left, Rachel Feinstein, Cecily Brown and Karin Davie with Louis Vuitton designer Marc Jacobs
at the opening of Takashi Murakami's "Superflat Monogram" at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, April 2003. Image courtesy of Artnet

One striking thing about Cecily Brown's paintings is their old-fashioned-ness. The sheer shock of someone making up structures from loose, open brush strokes -- putting their trust in talent and experience and a love of important things that have happened in art over the centuries -- as if the fashion and glamour-obsessed art world didn't exist, and there was some kind of hot, universally appreciated reason to be spontaneous, creative and imaginative with oil paint in a more or less uncorrupted way -- all this is good.

Of course, at the same time, everyone knows she's a star. She's no hermit. She's a lover of art-world fun. And she comprehends and wants to answer to ordinary popular desire.

The combination of a more or less old-fashioned approach to painting and a sense of fun about being an art-world star -- this is definitely striking. (One without the other is more expected.)

She's always at the centre of glamorous events, always being photographed, always making a scene. Flash Art recently called her an "expanded painter," meaning she gets across a lot of modern-type meaning by some kind of performance of selfhood, being a sexy modern shocker in the media spotlight not just an introverted striver in the studio.

The wish in Flash Art's idea of her for non-seriousness to be thought of as serious relates more to the oddness of our times than to anything important as such. As a society we want achievers to be celebrities so we can tell that there really has been an achievement. Most of us are too distracted, uneducated, shallow or thick, or just too busy seeking fun, to have any other way of telling.

It's very difficult for many people to accept this, but the truth is that the success-money-hip-show-off side of art is absolutely understandable and OK but not ultimately significant, and art -- with all its attendant horrible indulgent oblivious social badness, its offensive uselessness -- is only really acceptable or valuable if it has something earnest and sincere somewhere in the mix.

I went to Brown's New York studio in May 2008 to interview her for a magazine because she had a show coming up later in the year at Gagosian. (She was nervous about the show. I never saw it so I can't say if it came out OK.) The studio is in some kind of conserved vintage building. On the way into the studio part of her floor were works by contemporary hot figures, but I can't remember who they were now, apart from Christopher Wool, who's always a complete mystery to me.

The walls of her studio are painted a yellowish grey. There is work everywhere - "I work on them all at the same time." She makes easels out of ladders and garbage bins on wheels -- "I've never quite been able to buy an easel." She says she never questions if she's going to paint. Her aim is to make you pause: "Have a rich experience - just you and the object - alone in time."

She's aware of the mannerism of her style; she uses other drawings, unrelated to the particular painting she might be working on at that moment, to hold up the fluency, to build-in problems. She doesn't think of a division of image-types in her paintings: popular versus serious, for example: it's all popular in one way or another, she believes -- "A surprising number of people still value old masters, for whatever reason."

'Shadow Burn', 2005-2006
Oil on linen, 97 x 103 inches

Her imagery is fun and dense. You can see through it (not bother with it and look at the abstract form instead) or you can think about it. If you think about it, it's quite rich: landscape, a sense of the end of the world, and a world of sensuous pleasure, worlds of poetry and pop. Sex: direct as in images in porn films and magazines, and more vaguely and suggestively, as in the luminous evocations of flesh in de Kooning's 1960s and 70s hilarious sexy semi-abstracts, where melting, dripping, pink and white women merge into a light-filled landscape.

Nature: images of leaves, trees, grass, light, water, clouds and sky: a generalised painterly landscape that feels like fantasy, and seems always mediated through pictures in books; the forms tremble because of deliberate mannerism (not because of a Cezanne-esque apprehension of form through "little sensations" where one mark is always correcting another and the result is a sort of monumentally pulsing overall tremble -- instead the wriggly-ness is just laid-on, which is fine by me -- it allows other forms and fantasies into the picture).

A Brown "landscape" is often a mix-up of landscape shards and human-like fragments plus bits and pieces of all sorts of things: clothes, food and houses (something like the torn figurative fragments that populated Baselitz's Woodcutter paintings in the mid-1960s, but with much more various colour levels).

If the multifaceted fragmented colour-scapes recall the top moments of museum-style art, it might be a Dejeuner sur l'herbe fused with Brueghel's Triumph of Death. (She says, "There can be a feeling of apocalypse or a feeling of a picnic, often both at once.") The fragments come from the same image-bank that every contemporary culture-vulture has, but also the moods come from everywhere: not just painting but all levels of culture: mass-culture fucks and blow jobs, plus human heads floating in a sea of shit from Dante's Inferno; Roccoco young woman on a swing plus death skull on a T-shirt plus comic face with glasses plus Poussin glade with distant hills.

What is good about her paintings is energy - the energy of the marks allied to an energetic range of subjects -- or rhetorical image-frameworks you could call them. Sex, skulls, ambivalent body/Nature blurring, and a cosmic feeling of everything that exists being gathered up in a single abstract unity -- the kind of thing that appeals to the typical contemporary art audience but done in an old-fashioned painterly way.

'Untitled', 2007-2008
Oil on linen, 43 x 65 inches

When she was young she was overwhelmed by the discovery of contemporary art compared to a romantic popular idea of the beauty and humanity, and so on, of Bonnard. She tried to do art about identity instead -- about female-ness -- doing, as she puts it, videos "of myself" -- deconstructing meaning -- "I was trying to be a female art student."

At this time she wondered: "How you could have an edge if you were only a painter?" She'd always been one, always been praised for it and always done it - but now she thought: "It's so limited!" So she didn't paint at all except for some assemblages after a year or so -- "But then the lack of limits drove me insane." So she got herself out of obedient identity-art and back into painting, where ideally (I would say anyway) you do obey rules but the difference is you evolved them yourself.

Today she thinks of her pictures as a balance of melancholy and exuberance: "I use a certain exuberance to get attention in the first place. Think of music. Fairground music is actually pretty heartbreaking - mad, exuberant energy -- and then there's melancholy."

The mood is in the form, the way depicted objects are given a bit of animation and life simply by paint handling. A large picture of plates and a tablecloth that looks a bit bloody could be an event full of dread and murder -- or "it could just be how the people left the room after they finished eaten."

She says she's 's interested in the "sweet reading" turning into the "sad reading." "The most innocent thing can seethe with eroticism - it can be carnivals or massacres."

She is good at articulating what she thinks her paintings are about, good in the sense that what she articulates is a very modern ideal -- moody, sensuous, entertaining, but also fragmented, elusive, chimeric, not connected to belief of any serious kind, but geared to a sampling aesthetic or sensibility.

That's it really. Although I can't help thinking: energy, did they have it in the past?

Good question. For some reason it became possible to see Impressionist or Van Gogh-like or Pollock-like or even Rothko-like energy in Bosch, Breughel and Van der Weyden, where in reality of course those northern Renaissance people were great masters of horror who are simultaneously great masters of musical pattern and colour harmony, but not at all great masters - in fact they couldn't care less about it - of wriggly open-ended brush strokes.

But nevertheless, Brown's paintings seem to say (if they were lectures they'd be saying this, and I'd be convinced): the energy of a Monet is there in a Jackson Pollock but also in a hard edge intricate Flemish painting. It is a particular painterly energy that doesn't need to be only expressed through sploshing but can happen through any type of way of seeing the abstract potential in improvised shapes -- the eye has a kind of energy of its own, the ability to enjoy, and to create as it's enjoying it, an improvised pattern. You come up with something because of some build-up of rhythmic energy a lot of which is unconscious. But unconscious is good. It's enough for the work that needs to be done -- the complicated electricity of the process we call improvising.

And the result could be hell, but it is Hell in an amazing lay out, a visually beautiful asymmetric balance of intervals and accents -- Hieronymous Bosch's Hell. Bosch's famous horrors aren't laid out so visually marvellously in such a rhythmic pattern simply so awfulness can be seen clearly: there has to be a heightened experience of "seeing." That's what the musicality is.

Apparently this requirement to be extremely pleasurable on an amazingly refined visual level like the most complicated but soaring music, was part of the culture that produced Bosch, and it seems to have been part of all preceding cultures, when they wanted visual icons to express their particular sense of what is important or eternal. And in fact all cultures; whether it's Northern Renaissance people or Cro-Magnons or new Parisian bourgeoisie. Bosch, cave art, Manet, whoever -- because of a heightened sense of seeing that their artworks express along with their different sets of iconographic contents, the human profundity is still there even if you don't care about St Michael judging the good and the bad souls, or big-breasted mother goddesses, or women in silk dresses on the banks of the Seine. But in Brown's approach or mindset a shadowy commander says maybe put bits of that imagery in the pictures anyway: why not? Those fragments hold form so enticingly, and frankly they are full of interest too, like a novel or a movie.

A fragmented image-world plus a world of profundity - is this possible? Perhaps profundity isn't really the issue. Or at least its fiction has become less desirable. When Modernism was still going on the great art of the pre-Modern past -- Rubens, etc -- could be seen purely in terms of new aesthetics, in fact purely in terms of Purity (which is recalled today as a sort of fad and often fondly rehashed in a camp form as Retro). Now Rubens and so on are seen by contemporary art as just another image bank, no different to porn magazines. So you might as well put them both together.

'Untitled (#38)', 2007
Oil on linen, 12-1/2 x 17 inches

I don't know if Brown thinks any of this about great art etc. Her father was the art critic, David Sylvester (she only found out when she was in her early 20s) - her mother is the novelist, Shena Mackay. She went to the Slade art school in London, from 1989 -- 93. Before that she'd been painting for a long time in her mother's flat, went to life-drawing classes given by the English (totally non-trendy) figurative painter, Maggie Hambling, and after a while Hambling gave her a space to use as a studio in exchange for cleaning work. "She was tough on me. She made me work every day even if I wasn't in the mood. She turned me into a workaholic." It was the paintaholic experience that enabled her to get into the Slade. She came to New York in 1994, showed at Jeffrey Deitch, was a success, and then was taken up by Gagosian. She will be 40 next year.

When I went to her studio it was a time when two old master shows were on at the Metropolitan Museum: Poussin and Courbet. They both do flesh and foliage. Poussin does abstract architectonic complexity, so marvellous that it is poetic in itself regardless of the depicted architecture, depicture landscape, and depicted figures - and these depicted elements are certainly marvellous in themselves; so distanced, grand and monumental: gods, lovers and death-snakes, ruins and rivers, farmers and riders, great visual poems to a light that seems totally real. And Courbet can be seen as abstract too: abstract broadness - broad simplified people, broadness of sky and earth, broad earthy paint handling.

I enjoyed seeing some of this visual experience reprised in Brown's paintings, finished and unfinished, crowding her studio. To me her style of open gestures that ends up in some kind of architectonic structure, different for every picture, is a well known post-modern version of Abstract Expressionism, which I usually think of as a feeble footnote to the history of visual style, on the whole. But in her use of it she comes up with slippery, shifting, sly echoes or references to the art of the past, which are actually quite enjoyable.

That woozy, art-school, scribbled painting style that emerged as an official look in the early 1970s -- in England connected with such art schools as the Slade, Camberwell and St Martins - came originally from a lesser-level of New York Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. Its post-modernism lies in its built-in equivocation, wanting to be figurative and abstract, landscape and dream, literal smear and depicted contour of river or hill or cloud or side of a cherub's wing. But not wanting to go whole-heartedly for something narrow and convincing, which Abstract Expressionism was really about (and the hardcore formal aims of which were really taken over in the early 1960s by minimalism and Colour Field painting). Brown has tackled this easy wriggle-style, or attacked it, so it has become unexpectedly convincing.

Maybe it is the drive to be pop, to turn people on, to bring in the hotness and fun of the culture of the ignorant, rather than just be willing to imitate the tasteful boredom of second-generation Abstract Expressionists (Joan Mitchell or whoever). But whatever the reason, her impulsive, short-burst, drawing-with-colour style lures me in and makes me look - it made me look around her big studio space at little pictures balanced on funny home-made easels, and big paintings leaning against the walls.

I saw less imagery in the painterly squiggles when I first came in than after I'd been there for a while: as my eyes adjusted, faces, pools, branches, beams of light, all started coming through. But mostly the atmosphere was lyrical not blatant. Little paintings: stabbing little wriggly angular blobs, hot-coloured or grey or blue or mauve: a vortex or a wall or a glade with light coming through. Big paintings: table cloths, dinner plates, human heads and floating bodies.

A monumental jittery look plus imagery that people like, or at least it won't leave them behind. When she references painting's traditions it is never really in a way that causes the past to seem somehow imbued in the forms, but more to be present as a ghostly figurative image -- while the forms remain arbitrary or answering only to their own abstract values. It's a style where separation is important or inevitable, or maybe helpless. What does it mean that she is a woman doing it?

Many artists today think it is good to ditch the lessons of the past, because of the past's unfortunately conservative values; but they perhaps ditch too many good visual things along with the bad moral things. Maybe it is a mistake to junk the accumulated knowledge and sensibility from centuries of artistic practice in favour of a sensational urgent contemporaneity. Art from the past is supposed to be loaded with ideology, but disposing with sensibility in favour of the equality of ignorance is ideological too.

The profound level of all art regardless of its changing superficial levels - this can be accessed today. This is the Abstract Expressionist mindset: a masculine mind. The notion that everything in art flows into this one point in time, your own 1950s studio full of integrity: the point of artistic freedom, and ability to access the great truths through painterly means (rough surfaces and improvised form). Modernism's history peaks at this moment and after that it's over. And it's been all men, more or less. The women that got in were exceptions; they become the figures for a new revised idea of the past. One in which profundity of this kind (modern art's recasting of pre-modern art's visual grandeur using modern means) becomes less and less appealing, and what is desired instead is an understanding of various relativisms. (There are women in Abstract Expressionism but they are only the Me-Toos whom new survey exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism desperately try to pretend were just as significant as the men.)

You could look right through the imagery in Brown's paintings, and see the abstract values that permeate the paintings (turn them back into masculine modernism, as it were).

Actually you can do the same with the artists that have influenced her, who offer variations on or challenges to Abstract Expressionism's purity. The emotionally overwrought screams in Francis Bacon, the sentimental existentialism in Philip Guston, and the absurd sex-fiend victim-women in 1950s-period de Kooning. Bacon's real contribution is voluptuous surfaces and colour, his Rothko-backgrounds and his Monet-carpets, his free, curving contours and his luscious expansive ruffled textures; Guston is a charming composer of dirtied colour-shapes, and de Kooning a great king of intricate flickering abstraction - complicated shapes flickering back and forth between positive and negative.

So the good thing is energy. It is applied to the following things. "Architecture" in a painting context -- the architectonic values that eventually buil-up out of her bit-by-bit improvised approach. Mid-range tones. Warm colours. Free drawing (relating to the architecture thing). A type of visual art that makes itself up as you look so you're always enjoying the sight from a different perspective or starting point (relating to the same thing again). John Currin, Cecily Brown: natural names in a list -- her achievement is to be both a serious artist and a sort of convincing, feminine version of male attention seekers in the art world. Everyone has a subtle sense of celebrity: that is, we're able to understand it in a subtle way. Few of us have any interest in seriousness in art, though we constantly pay lip service to such an interest.

Matthew Collings