The isle of the dead - portrait

A crouching nude figure dominates this painting, its bare back and bent limbs seeming to melt and ripple as if the flesh were made of moving liquid. Glenn Brown, a British painter with a reputation for reinventing older artworks, covers every part of the body with thin threads of color that twist and coil together. The strangest thing about his method is that the surface is completely smooth. All that churning texture is an illusion, painted onto a canvas as flat as glass, which gives the whole image an eerie, dreamlike quality.

The title tips its hat to "Isle of the Dead," a brooding masterpiece by Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin from the 1880s, and you can spot the connection in the dark water and faint mountains resting in the lower corner. Brown loved to raid the past and bend famous images into something unfamiliar, and that is exactly what happens here. Seen close, the skin bursts into yellows, blues, and reds, like a sunset somehow poured into a human form. Puzzling out where one shape stops and another starts becomes part of the fun, and the figure never quite settles into anything solid.