Simplicity is Complexity Resolved

One of the questions I’m often asked in interviews is, ‘where do you find inspiration?’ And though the answer is ‘everywhere!’, one person that I reference again and again is the sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. As an art-lover, I’ve spent countless afternoons strolling around galleries and museums, but still remember so vividly visiting the Pompidou Centre in 1995 to see a major retrospective of his work. Although I'd seen photographs of his sculptures before it was only when I saw them in the 'flesh' that I really understood. I remember thinking 'This is it!'  and feeling quite euphoric. It was a real lightbulb moment for me and from then on I became obsessed with his ideas and work.

Brâncuși’s art centres around clean, geographical lines and simple forms (from tall columns to birds and fish) and he created his sculptures using materials with smooth surfaces like marble and bronze. He often produced different versions of the same sculpture, making them increasingly abstract and simplified each time - it’s this very simplistic, elegant style that he’s known for today and that drew me to him. I absolutely adore how Brâncuși can turn simple shapes and basic forms into truly beautiful pieces, and especially love his highly polished brass sculptures - the high shine catches the light to create the most beautiful highlights and reflections which are just stunning, and also very inspiring. It this polish and shine that I have tried to recreate in my own work... only my canvas is skin.

Brâncuși also had lots of great quotes about art and what it meant to him. One of my favourites is ‘simplicity is complexity resolved’ - it’s a saying I live by, and it works so well in makeup.

If you’re a Brâncuși fan you’ll know that he led a fascinating life. He was born in Hobitza, a small village in Romania, and studied at Craiova School of Arts & Crafts and Bucharest School of Fine Arts before walking from Romania to Paris in 1903 (when he was 27) to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The British film director Peter Greenaway is currently filming a Brâncuși biopic, ‘Walking to Paris’, which focuses on this trek across Europe and how it influenced Brâncuși’s later work - Greenaway says that, as he walked, Brâncuși was ‘constantly building sculptures out of found materials - wood, stone, sand, snow and ice, leaving a trail of abandoned experimental structures across the landscapes of Europe.’ Wouldn't you love to have stumbled across these?!

Though he spent the majority of his working life in Paris, the first show that really launched Brâncuși’s career was the Armory Show in New York in 1913. It was the first large exhibition of modern art in America and his work sat alongside prices by other contemporary artists like Van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne. One of the sculptures that he included in the show was Mademoiselle Pogany, a portrait of Brâncuși’s friend Margit Pogany, a young Hungarian artist. Though Mademoiselle Pogany is now one of Brâncuși’s most loved sculptures (and one of my favourites), at the show it was ridiculed by some of the press and exhibition visitors - they claimed her features were nonsensical (her nose was likened to a beak and her eyes were said to be bulbous). One journalist described the sculpture as ‘a hard-boiled egg balanced on a cube of sugar.’