Last Friday was a dreary, crummy, gray day, with the Seattle weather beating down on the city. Downtown, people pushed past each other, a few begrudgingly using their umbrellas to stop the sideways pissing rain from soaking them any further. It was only 5:30 p.m., but Seattle’s gray season can be one big eternal night. But in the Hilton Hotel lobby off Howell, streaks of fleshy pink, sickly yellow, white, and black break up the monotony of the new, same-looking buildings along the street.
Bring Me the Sunset in a Cup is a nine-foot-long painting by British artist Cecily Brown located in the lobby of that Hilton Garden Inn; you don’t even have to go inside to enjoy its beauty. Her brushstrokes are visible from the cold pavement outside the hotel, something to glimpse as you quickly walk past, en route to another destination.
What surprises me about Bring Me the Sunset in a Cup is how neutered it feels. I’m most familiar with her work that’s more overtly erotic; Brown’s paintings often look like sex and bodies suspended and abstracted mid-fuck, rendered in goopy, tactile, excessive flesh tones. Looking at her work is reminiscent of the actual deed at its best—frenetic, animalistic, unsure of where one body begins and the other ends.
Despite its location, the piece in the hotel lobby is decidedly desexed, purely abstract. Underneath cold, white-twinged lighting, there’s not a foot or arched back to be seen. It’s a swirl of color and texture that only faintly suggests the idea of a figure or body. It’s a shame, because I think hotel lobbies—and hotel bars, in particular—can be spaces of deviance, desire, chance, naughtiness. And loneliness. But I “got” the SFW abstraction as families scurried past me inside the lobby.
The title—Bring Me the Sunset in a Cup—is taken from an Emily Dickinson poem. In it, she deliciously dissects nature’s beauty. The stanza ends like this:
BRING me the sunset in a cup,
Reckon the morning’s flagons up,
And say how many dew;
Tell me how far the morning leaps,
Tell me what time the weaver sleeps
Who spun the breadths of blue!
