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STATEMENTS BY THE ARTIST

Over the years, James Brooks has made a variety of statements about his art, his methods, his ways of thinking. Because these are unusually succinct and to the point, the viewer might find it helpful to read them here. 

Written for the exhibition,
FORTY AMERICAN PAINTERS, 1940-1950,
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1961

The painter convinces himself that he is working with formal relationships alone, and that is his strength. He really knows that the relationships are meaningful only if they imbed his real reason for painting - a way of feeling that is forming and unnamed. He knows that these meanings are buried deep and are not available through research, analysis or existing systems of formal logic. They occur only through the rigid but supple relationships of his art form.

As a painting grows these meanings appear unexpectedly and always with a different look, so that their recognition requires an incredible combination of innocence, alertness, and tough-mindedness. And as, more than ever before, the painter's concern is with relationships rather than images, he looks for form as a sentry does at night, by looking around it. Images become so fused and interdependent that they no longer exist as such, and instead of a drama of competing images the painting exists as a resolved whole. The drama now occurs between the painting, no longer defended by a massive frame, and its chance environment.

Written for the exhibition,
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS EXHIBITION
OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN 
PAINTING, University of Illinois,
Urbana, 1952

My painting starts with a complication on the canvas surface, done with as much spontaneity and as little memory as possible. This then exists as a subject. It is as strange as a new still life arrangement as confusing as any unfamiliar situation. It demands a long period of acquaintance during which it is observed both innocently and shrewdly. Then it speaks, quietly, with its own peculiar logic. Between painting and painter a dialogue develops which leads rapidly to the bare confrontation of two personalities. At first a rhythm of the painting is modified, then a chain of formal reactions sets in that carries painting and painter through violent shifts of emphasis and into sudden unfamiliar meanings.

At some undetermined point the subject becomes the object, existing independently as a painting.