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Question: Do you start several paintings at once? Brooks: I don't. I start one painting, although I think the best way to work, for any painter to work is to have several paintings going. I find though that one of my limitations is that I get stuck on one painting, can't leave it, and consequently I waste a lot of time by not being able to get away from it long enough to forget parts that I should destroy. So, I do work on one painting most of the time, until I'm through. Question: Well, how does this relate to your procedure of chance, the, or aren't you using that anymore? Brooks: The chance occurs as I work on a painting. I'll get a form that will be too rigid or the whole image of the painting will be too rigid, then I'll just get just a vague idea. Sometimes it doesn't last till I walk across the room to do it. But it's quite often that fleeting. But then if I put something down whether it's -- whether I feel that it's the right thing or the wrong thing, or just on a hunch, then I will start to break the dam quite often. I may continue the form that I have or switch it suddenly to a new form as the painting develops. Question: About the end of 1952, you again changed the forms of your expression to less amorphous, more assertive ones. Was this an effort for more personal expression or interpretation of a universal order? Brooks: There's a time when an artist works when he suddenly breaks through into a realization of what he is himself, and it shows in his painting. And that is a strange revelation because of the time his painting isn't the kind of painting he admires but it's quite different maybe. It was in my case at first. I'd always admired the rather monolithic forms of Giotto, Uccello, and such, and then I started working more unconsciously and worked more freely and my work did flower at that time. But it had no relation to the more severe forms that I was always interested in and striven for. So I realized then I wasn't the person who could create the forms that I admired most but that I created something else. Then -- you spoke of a breaking of form, of changing of the form of painting that occurs regularly -- I think it's because you work for a while in a certain way and then these forms develop in our mind into clichés. They're not exciting to you anymore. And then as the tension sets up between your personality and the work of the artists you've always admired which you strive for then and you try to pull it back toward that more. And so it breaks your form. Sometimes you go through periods of very poor production or very stiff work and I think it's that tension between those two things that keeps a person nervous about his work, harried, changing. Sometimes it will occur -- your contemporaries, they will force that a little you know. But mostly it's the things you set up early in your life of artists that you've always admired, an ideal which you leave once in awhile. You go more toward yourself as you are, but then you have periods where you want to go towards yourself as you might be. It's never that clear at any time. But I have a hunch that's what happens. Question: There's a potential there that you would like to fill or try out or see? Brooks: I think so. There's something you've always loved in painting. That you're not getting, and you think you've been successful in getting something that's pretty close to you but nevertheless you're missing that other thing which is a form or an image that has always meant a lot to you that you can't do without permanently. Question: How deliberate were -- or are -- these changes? Brooks: The deliberate change that occurs in different periods is partly deliberate but it's also that as you work the forms don't satisfy you and you're -- your usual way of working is that you erase things if they don't satisfy you. That's all. And then you're consciously searching but you're also unconsciously searching for a form that will satisfy you. You can do it sometimes by -- or help yourself to do it -- by changing your media a little or material you work on. Something that gives you some kind of a resistance, that slows you up, that creates new kinds of things, new kinds of images, more kinds of unforeseen things. And of course, the change in the work -- the reason it changes is because the artist is trying to keep from being bored by his work, that's all. And if you repeat yourself, you get bored. And so I think painting is just an extension of life and just a flight from boredom. And I know Picasso has said that the reason he paints is because he gets bored when he does other things. And it can be said more romantically that painting is very exciting, that he wouldn't do anything else. But it can be either way. And I know some painters who do their best work and I do quite often, when I am the most bored at times. Because then that relieves me sometimes of the responsibility of doing something interesting or something with real meaning to it, you know. The painting as it leaves is pretty well forgotten, as far as I am concerned. And the interest quite often switches very quickly to the
