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Written for the exhibition, CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN PAINTING AND SCULPTURE, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1961

There never has been a purely formal or a purely figurative art, and the artist is not interested even in the degree of the mixture of the two. These are the anxieties of the trend-setter, the historian, the power-hungry critic, and the venal painter. Unable to predict the outcome of a single work, an artist is certainly unable to predict a trend.

To paraphrase Robert Graves: the subject matter of art has always been the same, and for the artist there has been no choice but the single theme of Life and Death. The function of art is the religious invocation of the Muse: its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.

Written for FOUR O'CLOCK FORUM

Discipline is felt as Giotto, El Greco, Cezanne and others wander into the studio, each supremely confident and insistent. What they say sounds right, but the painter knows he lives among different things and events, and sees other paintings than they did. So he locks his door, knowing he will hear their voices the rest of his life, but hoping he will hear them not as many voices but as one great amalgam, style.

If the painter is lucky, painful conflicts between freedom and necessity, subject and object, dissolve as he works. Discipline and spontaneity, that had seemed so antagonistic, merge as he engages in a dialogue with his painting. 

Our own personalities, developing from one of countless changing gene combinations; our close environment; partly happenstance and partly chosen — but chosen through predetermined affinities and affections; our wide environment on the earth and now into the galaxies, all this is circumstance, which we must balance with tradition to accomplish a form. The tool for doing this is an awareness of the pattern of life and its most permanent records, which might be called style or discipline. 

Exerpts [[Excerpts]] from Glady Kashdin's interview with James Brooks, March 8, 1965, Sarasota, Florida

QUESTION:
Around 1948 your work was in a phase of radical transition. You were exploiting automatism and chance by working from the reverse side of the canvas, and utilizing and controlling the stains and blots on the front. How do you put yourself in the proper mental attitude to work with chance? Was this a deliberate effort to change your style?

BROOKS:
I think it was probably a desperate situation but also encouraged by the attitude of other artists or the work that was occurring around at the time, which was that this dam had to be broken through of thinking too consciously about things which encouraged remembered forms — remembered from other artists, rather than fresh ones. And, so when I was working in Maine one summer, '47 I believe it was, the stains that occurred when I glued paper down to linen after I'd made the paintings, came through on the thin cloth in very provocative shapes. They were new to me. So I started using that more at the time. And then from then on for quite a while I worked on a rather thin canvas and with a liquid paint. Mostly enamels. 

And sometimes they were more provocative from the back than from the front. But it was mainly an effort to find newness or strangeness or accidents on the surface that didn't seem mine. It was a desperate effort to break the cliches that I had. I was just reading again Igor Stravinsky's Poetics of Music and in his chapter on the process of art — it isn't called that — composition of music — I think — I agree with him perfectly on his idea about accident.

QUESTION:
Do you have regular work schedule and habits?

BROOKS:
Fairly regular. The work develops through — the painting develops through the working through it, so I start to work whether I am interested in working that day or not. And a habit has developed as it has with most painters, of going to the studio and just starting to work or looking with your work, and I find that if you can sit down and look at an uncompleted work that you are immune to it, so there's no bother about that. And that anything that happens that might complete the work or give it a real kick occurs as you're working on it, certainly not anything you've thought of in between work times. So I do have a fairly regular work schedule most of the day — I go in at nine o'clock and finish up at four or something. I work very little at night.