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new things. Sometimes it has right before the painting is finished. It leads into something else which you're interested in, but I don't fell -- I have to recognize, that anything I do is a part of what I am or what I have been, but it always seems a part of what I have been rather than what I am. So it seems more in the past. Something I'm not interested in at all any more. Sometimes I like to look at it and wonder what I did or recall certain things, but it's a different kind of interest than that, that I have when I am working with something. QUESTION: A painting then while you're working on it is part of your life, part of you, an extension of your life. Then once it leaves, it's finished or finished as you can make it or wish to make it. It has a life of its own? It's no longer a part of you? BROOKS: Well, I think it has life of its own. I think the painter should be willing to give it up. I don't think he can help it. As a matter of fact, I know some painters who do try to protect it as it leaves their hands -- to keep track of it destroyed, naturally, but you can't manage your children that way. You send them out into the world, you know, and there they are, and there are many of them, and you can't -- you're busy at something. The main thing is that you're occupied with painting something else at the time. which is all your life is, actually, all the activity of it. A painting, the finished product, is of no particular importance to the artist at all. QUESTION: In the same vein, although the painting is a product and out in the world on its own, while you're working on it -- the forms you mentioned once as having a life of their own -- could you comment on that? The forms as they developed had a life of their own? BROOKS: Well, to really paint, I think you have to recognize that the thing you're working on is a definite thing -- or you have to feel that it is, anyhow. You have to believe that it's a definite personality that sets up a communication, or a dialogue occurs so that it can give you as much as you can give it. I don't think you can force a canvas at all. I don't think you can decide to do things and you think they'll look good and they'll look good. That never happens. You have to take what's in the canvas, develop it, and then it has a life of its own to some degree all along. But it's not the life you want. It's a very long life sometimes. You get a complication working that's a very challenging thing, but it's repulsive to you even, and so the process of painting is gradually talking it into going your way. But I think it exists -- a life all its own all the way through, but there is a time when it really starts to speak, if it's going to be a successful painting, and then that's very recognizable -- it's a kind of a transformation. A transformation suddenly occurs that really speaks not as you have it speak, but in a strange way which is aside from you and has a life of its own then, very clearly, and that's the one thing that the painter gets once in a while which is an invigorating thing of his life when it supercedes him or his thought leads him into new places that he attaches to the painting but actually is himself that he never knew before. Written for ART NOW: NEW YORK, 1971 The artist's function is to initiate, with the tools he likes best, a set of circumstances through which relationships that are important and peculiar to him may generate themselves. My interest is in this encouragement of the forms that are intent on surfacing, and my function is to act not as a maker but as a discoverer. I start a canvas with a mindless complication of several colors which I then accept as a separate entity, and on equal terms. Small dissatisfactions lead to larger exchanges and changes; and the painting ends as the object rather than the subject, which it has been up to that time.
