Viewing page 11 of 80

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

discoveries happen but nevertheless it's living in an area of doubt all the time, an area of not knowing what can happen or what should be done to a painting. I just put the first strokes on the canvas and it's up to the canvas to do at least half the rest of the work on it, and I think it is true that you have to feel that the canvas does have an ego that is at least as important as yours. You can't violate it; you have to take its suggestions and treat it like a real thing, you know, like a real person, like a real entity; unless you do, you kill it, of course. If you force or you are too willful, you force the style of it; you force it to something that has nothing to do with you and so it has nothing to do with itself either. A very strange situation. I believe, but a painting does paint itself. It insists on itself. I do not know any other way to paint but I do not know any other way to live fruitfully than cooperate with circumstance and watch the environment, be frustrated by it like it and let it act also."

     Three paintings supporting brooks' new precise mode of expression of particular depths are CASPER, 1973, primarily large bold forms of black, white and red-orange; IBBOLE, 1973, with luminous transparent gray, white, black and red-brown, the circular form interacting on a projected plane from the border black form, making a clash of contradictory situations and F, 1974, which has a blue fleeting, gusting, restless calligraphic line turning to white as it passes over a translucent gray area. Brooks used to number his paintings to identify them but for years he has been using the alphabet starting each year with A which might remain as such or turn into a word either invented or real. 1974 started with ALFAIR, a small brilliant painting only 24 x 27 which seems four times its size because of its strong color and great power.