Delia Brown’s drawings are part of an on-going project loosely based on the plot of Claude Chabrol’s 1968 film Les Biches, which tells the story of an emotionally unstable young would-be painter, and her seduction into the arms and lifestyle of an heiress on a constant quest for relief from the tedium of a privileged life. In the drawings, Brown plays the heiress while the actress Hollis Witherspoon portrays the artist.

In the past Brown has addressed genre painting through still life, portraiture, self-portraiture, lush interior scenes, as well as the use of live models. In Felicity and Caprice, Brown employs allegory to portray a modern-day relationship between two women. Jealousy, assumed identity, madness, the tenuousness of relationships, and the complex dynamic between artist and patron play out in the intricately executed drawings on colored paper. Brown states: “By stripping Allegory of its moral determinacy and therefore reducing it to a formal pastiche, I look to use it as the structure within which to explore the romantic, social and economic desires of the artist.”