Accompanying Text written by Cathy Lomax.
‘Ashes of Roses’, a pinkish grey colour that provided the name for a well-known 20th century perfume and range of cosmetics by Bourjois of Paris, has a special resonance for Gemma Browne, acting as a conduit for the memories that are such an important engine for her creative process. Browne remembers the name from Quentin Crisp’s memoir The Naked Civil Servant in which he recounts that in the 1960s while working in advertising he created a poster for Coty’s Ashes of Roses. Memory is of course nebulous, and as far as I can find Coty have never had a product with this name. To paraphrase playwright Tennessee Williams’ tragic heroine Blanche Dubois, magic is more important than realism.
A 1933 ad for Bourjois’s ‘Ashes of Roses’ face powder declares it ‘the charm of alluring femininity’. This gallant claim conjures images of shy young women being escorted to their debutante balls, faces dusted with perfumed powder, an extravagant spray of flowers pinned to their decolletage. In I Remember Yellow Roses Browne surrounds an image of a fashionable looking young woman with strident yellow roses. She remembers that her parents planted yellow roses in their garden and a rose was the first flower that she knew the name of. The reference point for Browne’s painted roses is a 1970s book she found in Belgium, an era when new hybrid varieties were bred with extravagant blossoms but no fragrance. The book’s highly coloured photographs supercharge rather than emulate nature.
Flowers are often used as metaphors for young women in poetry and literature. The rapidly fading bloom of a rose and its comparison to the fleeting beauty of youth is contemplated and critiqued by Browne’s paintings. Her pools and patches of pink and brown paint fluidly combine, like makeup, to describe the skin of the women, who in Blossoms, Amber and True stare intensely in close-up. These and the other paintings of young women do not depict individuals, they are amalgams drawn from found images, their unsmiling looks atmospherically unsettling alongside the brightly coloured blooms. Browne describes them as portraits of female energy and their nearly-always-direct gaze is unerring.
Roses are frequently co-opted to sell products in the beauty industry – Max Factor’s ‘Crushed Rose’ lipstick, ‘a fresh new colour plucked from a garden’ (1955); Scandia’s ‘Crème Rose’, which imparts ‘flower freshness and petal softness to all types of complexions’ (1946); Helena Rubinstein’s ‘Bed of Roses’ lipstick, ‘dew-kissed and moist’ (1958); and Maybelline’s ‘Snow Rose’ eyeshadow, which makes ‘your winter eyes bloom like summer’ (1971). But it is the evocation of ‘Ashes of Roses’ that renders Browne’s new work so particular and resonant. This dusty shade currently has upmarket resonances; part of the expensive Little Green ‘Victorian’ paint range (as used by the National Trust) and a luxury lipstick in the boutique Lisa Eldridge makeup line. Rather than fresh and dewy this is a fading rose, tinged with a melancholic nostalgia, and as such by painting it on your walls or lips you are tapping into a contemporary longing for something that no longer is and probably never was.
Bourjois of Paris in a 1933 ad for their ‘Ashes of Roses’ face powder declare that it will create loveliness ‘without a hint of artificiality’. They are, to once again borrow from Tennessee Williams (this time his narrator in The Glass Menagerie), creating ‘an illusion that has the appearance of truth’. Browne’s Ashes of Roses mirrors this conceit; her extravagant paintings excoriate the artificiality of beauty and critique the commercial Sisyphean nature of fashion as it arrives once again upon animal print, the 1990s, or gothic Victoriana. Browne says that Ashes of Roses ‘features females and flowers but suggests many other things’, most particularly, in my reading, it vividly embodies the second half of Williams’ statement – ‘truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion’.
Cathy Lomax
