“I don’t really get to decide when [brat]’s over or not,” Charli XCX told Contributing Editor Anna Peele during an extended interview for Vanity Fair‘s cover story this month — “I think that’s up to the world.” If VF has a say, brat (2024) and the career evolution it has imposed on the singer and producer are still relevant over a year later, especially since the magazine commissioned contemporary artist Issy Wood for a portrait of the British pop star for the cover of its first art issue in 20 years publishing this November.
Though Charli is intentionally absent from the award-winning album’s iconic, retina-singing green and blurry text cover art, Wood brings her front and center again in a simultaneously fuzzy and edgy oil portrait on equally shocking orange velvet. Depicting Charli from her cupid’s bow to the crown of her head, the painter captures the arched brows and hooded eyes of the party princess’s lethal stare piercing from beneath her buoyant waves.
For the portrait, the American-born British painter told VF that she drew from “the length and quality of [Charli’s] career prior to the global success of brat, the throwaway candor of her lyrics, [and] the Britishness we both share.” But not without adding her own flourishes of yellow twinkles and sweeping white lines that loop and bounce across the singer’s face, elements that walk the line between a fun Instagram face filter and doodles on the margins of one’s ruled notebook and push a surreal intimacy throughout the painting.
Wood’s portrait both references and complements Aidan Zamiri’s photos of Charli XCX for the singer’s October cover story with the magazine.
Wood, who also produces her own music in addition to her established visual arts practice, appears to understand at its core what Charli XCX means when she pronounces that “Everything is Romantic.” Perhaps not necessarily through “bad tattoos on leather-tanned skin,” as the singer emphasizes on the track, but in other similarly quotidian yet captivating sights and scenes: canker sores and tightened braces, rippling back muscles and shiny challah bread, car interiors and shiny revolvers.
Her paintings, some of which are currently on view through January in a solo show at Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin, flutter between alluring and unsettling as they tap into forgettable moments and sensations, buried desires or suppressed fears, and curiosity beyond one’s control.
Wood noted to the magazine that it was a challenge to capture one of the most famous faces of the 2020s compared to the nature of her own practice, but accepted any labels of the work reading as fan art because that is “one of the purest and most tender art forms we have.”
Like Wood, Charli herself is markedly expressing interest in new artistic endeavors, from establishing herself and the fans who attended her impromptu album remix concert at Storm King Art Center last year as “fine art bitches now” to going on to star in forthcoming films.
