Kaleidoscopic No. 14: John Brooks, Pt. 2
moving through the world attuned to emotions and moods..
John Brooks:
You asked about influences, definitely Hockney. Hockney is one of my heroes. I think he is just an incredible artist and he's so interesting. I've read a number of books and interviews and there are several books that he's done with Martin Gayford which are just endlessly fascinating. He has so much knowledge. He was someone that I'd known about even in college, before I went to London, my knowledge of contemporary art was pretty slim, but he was someone that I did know.
I knew mostly the portrait driven art from that time period and I got to see so much of his work in London. And really was just blown away by his curiosity and commitment to exploring new materials. I actually try not to look at him too much any more, because I looked at him so much! Peter Doig is another of my absolute favorites. I am guilty of looking at him. He was another painter that I discovered in London, and this was around 2007.
John Brooks:
I just love his sense of color and the way his work wanders. Munch is also someone whom I love. And I’ve been looking at a lot of Noah Davis. Marlene Dumas is another artist I love. I got to see a lot of her work in London and I love the emotional qualities present in her work.
Mood and emotional resonance are really the very first things that I think about and care about and consider in my work . At the same time there's a stillness in my work. The figures are, even if they're seemingly in some kind of movement, they're almost frozen and there's not a lot of obvious outsized emotion. Their visages are very subtle, there's evidence hopefully of an interior life rather than an exposition of action.
John Brooks:
Ernest Ludwig Kirchner is another of my favorites. He's someone I do think about his use of color a lot. My dog Ludwig is also named after him. Max Beckmann is another of my absolute favorites. I think about him a lot. You mentioned Wayne Thiebaud, and Diebenkorn. I haven't had a lot of exposure to their work but when I do see it I'm very interested in it, and see some correlations. I had a visiting curator in the studio here last week and just by looking at my work, she asked if I was from LA. Very much no, <laughs> but I like warm weather, I like sunshine, I love light, so I am drawn to those things, and I think that's one of the things that like even with David Hockney, that's something that pulled me in early on.
Leonardo Bravo:
I wanted to ask about the "I See This Echoing" body of work, and again this facility that you have with line and color, and how that translates to landscape and the way you're able to kind of capture some of these landscape scenes. If you can talk a little bit about that.
John Brooks:
The “I See This Echoing” body of work is an ongoing series. I had a solo show at MARCH in New York last April. This whole series of drawings—now there are well over 100, and they're all the same scale 50 by 38 and a half inches—that they exist at all is a surprise. In the aftermath of my solo show at Moremen Gallery in Louisville in 2021, Susan Moremen, who's the gallerist, said to me, why don't you do something different as a break to kind of start something else. And I had made like literally three drawings of that same scale in 2019, although they were much more collage inspired.
John Brooks:
But she suggested this, and, and my initial thought was, I don't want to do that. I'm not doing that. But then I was so busy with life and with running a gallery that I realized actually I can make these drawings in three or four hours in a session in the studio, so I feel like I'm accomplishing something. Whereas a painting if I'm already well into a painting, that's a fine amount of time, but in order to get going I need like eight hours or more for a painting. And I just didn't have that time. So I started making these drawings and I just fell in love with the materials and the process and also the results.
John Brooks:
And drawing is something that has always been very much a part of my life. It influences and is present in my paintings in very real ways. But I hadn't worked with colored pencils probably since high school, this is like 30 years! And initially I was not planning on making what the series has largely become, which is a kind of record of, my global Queer community, but it just kind of happened.
Leonardo Bravo:
Seems like they have a diaristic feel to it.
John Brooks:
Well, they very much are a kind of diary. With few exceptions, you know, there's Marilyn Monroe, Joan Didion, and there are some kind of heroic figures, like from broader culture, but generally they are people I know either in my life or through Instagram. Many of them are other Queer artists; not all of them are, but they're somehow connected to the larger Queer culture as allies. I just started making the drawings slowly and loved doing them. The act of recording and amassing this history seems important.
John Brooks:
And the landscapes were an even further development that was unexpected. That they came about in a way because of some of the reactions I was getting to the drawings. There is some nudity in the drawings. It has been in my work here and there, but until recently, it's never been a huge part of my work. But people love to focus on that, and it was getting on my nerves. I would never make work that I didn't want to make, and I wouldn't make work to please other people, but I don't like the idea of being pinned down. I don't like the idea of being kind of encapsulated in a very small way.
John Brooks:
And so, kind of coming back to the beginning of our conversation, the natural world has always been important to my life. It's one of the main themes of my poetry. But it hasn't really featured much in my visual work and I thought about trying to incorporate it more. So, I started making the landscape drawings, all of which are based on photographs that I've taken and experiences I've had. I love the juxtaposition of the figures with the landscapes, and trying to consider how the moods are compatible.
Leonardo Bravo:
I'm looking on website where you have the "Mother will never understand why you had to leave" drawing, then on the opposite end there's "A cuckoo sings to me, to the mountain, to me, to the mountain"and there's such a sense of tenderness and generosity and kind of the mysteries of being for both of these that are profoundly moving.
John Brooks:
Thank you. I love to hear that because that's what I want to come through, that tenderness, that respect, an evidence of respect for existence, and connection. The fact that those two things can be, obviously on the surface, so different in terms of what they're presenting, yet they feel aligned with their sort of existential position, if that makes sense. I'm also now starting to explore that in some of my paintings. There's only one so far, but every painting I've made for the last 5, 6, 7 years has had a figure in it and now I have one that doesn't <laughs>. My paintings certainly influenced my drawings and now the drawings in a way are influencing the paintings, which I think feels exciting and rich.
Leonardo Bravo:
I'm very interested in the work that artists do to build communities of care and agency through their work. You talked about centering your work in terms of community, queerness, but also allyship and creating spaces for possibilities. You started this gallery project Quappi Projects, and if that's a point of reference for you about this.
John Brooks:
It is. I also think, just as I said if I had not moved to London, we wouldn't be sitting here, I think if I hadn't started the gallery, we wouldn't be sitting here. The gallery is now closed, which I'll get to, but my studio is in warehouse building in a neighborhood in Louisville called Portland. There are seven other artists in this building. We're not a collective, but we have some kind of communal aspect. In 2016, I moved in and shared a studio space with another artist. After a year, he decided to move out.
John Brooks:
At the time—this was in summer of 2017—my own practice was kind of dormant, and I had had this remote idea that maybe I would open a gallery someday, mostly because I knew that artists needed more opportunities here to show work. And one of the seeds for this was planted in 2015 when I took a summer course at a place in Berlin called Autocenter, which now I think is closed. The painter Norbert Bisky was teaching this course and I have followed his career so I applied to the course, I got in, and I'm sure they thought, who is this guy from Kentucky who's trying to come here <laughs>.
John Brooks:
I ended up spending the whole summer of 2015 there, and I was in Berlin for seven weeks and just had an incredible life-changing time. Norbert and I became friends and the next year I was back in Berlin and lamenting to him that I didn't have any opportunities to show my work, and he said, “well you should just start your own thing. Artists need to start their own things,” and at the time, I thought, okay, well that's a nice idea, but yeah, right, like that will happen! But then the following year when my studio mate moved out it became clear to me that, oh I actually could do this.
John Brooks:
And the space would work, the cost was very low. So in the summer of 2017 I opened the gallery space in my studio with the idea to alternate Louisville based artists with artists from elsewhere. So we started with an artist from New York. I had no expectations about how the community would interact with that or respond, but they responded really well. People were very engaged with what I was doing, what I was showing, and this gave me a position and a platform in the community, which had just never occurred to me as possibility. Also, we had been in London for a few years and then back to Louisville and then Chicago and back to Louisville, so I'd moved around a lot. While I had friends and acquaintances, and I knew artists, I had never really been fully engaged with the community in Louisville. I’d never had that before. So opening the gallery brought people into my space and into my life. This ultimately really affected my practice because as I said, within my practice, I was struggling. And consistently the feedback I got with the gallery was, “this is great, this is wonderful” but then when it came to my work, it was crickets. And, you know, again, I’d never make work to please other people, but if at the same time the feedback you're getting is consistently one way or the other, you might listen to that feedback. And so it ultimately changed my practice and it forced me to look at what I was doing and figure out a way to make it better. An opportunity then arose in 2019 to move the gallery to a proper space, which I did, and objectively it was one of best spaces around this area, in terms of like the physical space, white walls, concrete floors.
John Brooks:
It was very, very nice. Not something I could have ever imagined having. We opened in August 2019, and then of course, COVID came and the pandemic happened, and we managed to survive all of that. The gallery just gave me a chance to engage with so many artists, and collectors, and all different kinds of people, which was wonderful, but also not something I had really anticipated. When I opened the gallery, it was in my studio, it was very small scale, and then it became this very real thing.
John Brooks:
And I took that very seriously. I felt a great responsibility as the curator. I wrote all of the curatorial statements, which made me a better writer. It made me a better artist. But in the last couple of years as my own practice has taken off in new ways, managing both these things became really impossible. I made it work last year, with the help of a handful of people, but it really almost killed me. It’s impossible to operate both a gallery and a studio practice at a certain level, each takes all your time.
John Brooks:
Something had to give this year, so my plan for 2023 was to continue the gallery, but to cut back, instead of doing six shows, maybe do three or four shows. However late last summer my landlords came to me and said they're leaving the state, so the situation changed and it forced me to close the gallery. But then as I closed the gallery, and just started working in my studio, I realized I really didn’t have time for the gallery. Being an artist requires as much time as you’ve got.
As much as I loved curating and running the gallery, it was not a hard decision for me, as I would rather much rather be in the studio making my own work. But I'm so grateful for it. It has given me a community and that really is the thing that sticks out to me the most throughout this whole journey, which started 17 years ago. This is the second part of my life.
John Brooks:
It's been a long time getting to this point and previously I never really had much of a community. I've never really had colleagues, even though I was very much engaged with the world of golf, and I was fluent in that culture, it wasn't really my culture and I never really belonged. And so now to be 45, to be this age and to have this robust community of artists, both in my own city, but also, thanks to Instagram, around the country and around the world. It's incredible. I could never have imagined that and I feel so lucky to know these people and to be in conversation with them. It feels great.
Leonardo Bravo:
That's truly a beautiful thing. We talked about Hockney, somebody who's had a sustained effort over time, that long arc of what it takes to be an artist in the world, to maintain that sense of curiosity, that opening to constantly having your eyes open. And I think that requires a certain level of fortitude
John Brooks:
Strength. Absolutely.
Leonardo Bravo:
But also those gifts that community give you that can also uplift you.
John Brooks:
Absolutely. Being an artist requires a lot of fortitude. I’ve been doing this for a long time. My sort of reach has vastly increased over the last couple of years. And some people are maybe just getting to know me and from the outside, if you look like, oh, you started the gallery and you had this show and that show, it looks great! And, it is. And I'm very grateful for those things. But I also know that there were so many lean periods where I was so lonely and so isolated. Obviously, I’m very lucky in many, many ways. I’m fortunate to have friends and family. But there were many junctures at which it would've been easier to quit and it is that commitment to the long arc that I think is necessary. I know that I'm building a substantive body of work…maybe really in terms of the fully developed work, it has only been going for like four years but it took
Leonardo Bravo:
All of that before…
John Brooks:
Yes, the previous 40 years to do that. And given the political climate both in Kentucky, but also in the United States and around the world, my experiences seem relevant. I've always known that politics affects everything, so having a long time interest and knowledge base in that helps me, helps my work, helps conversations about my work. The more that I have engaged with both the artistic community and particularly the Queer artistic community, I am even more committed to strengthening those ties and increasingly that visibility. I think it's so necessary because there are people who are very much trying to erase us. I haven’t always viewed my work as political—that’s not the first thing that I'm thinking about—but when I think about the practice and the act of making in a broad way, it's absolutely part of what I'm doing.
Leonardo Bravo:
Being a person of color in the world is a political act, being a queer person in the world is a political act, merely by the fact of that our histories are based on erasure and displacement by a patriarchial and heteronormal system. A system that views anything different as the other and something that needs to be suppressed. How do you then generate a sense of presence in this world, given that we live in conditions that are about division, keeping us as the "other" instead of creating a sense of collective understanding of who we are as human beings.
John Brooks:
I think the ability to make change with that is through connection, is through volume. And so the fact that unlike any time before in my life, I do have a network of particularly other artists, that's what it takes. You can't exist in a silo making your work. In order to have what you're doing contribute to changing the culture and the reality, you have to engage with other people.
John Brooks:
You know I'm in Kentucky, I'm not in New York, or LA or Berlin, although sometimes I'd like to be, so making sure that those connections are strengthened and continuing is really important to me.
Leonardo Bravo:
John, this has been such a joy and a treat. I thank you to have this chance to be in conversation and gain a greater and deeper appreciation of you and your work.
John Brooks:
Ahh, thank you so much!
Leonardo Bravo:
I hope to visit you in Louisville at some point and hope you come to Berlin. And hope to bring your work to Berlin. Maybe a way to collaborate in the future with that. Yes!
John Brooks:
That's great. Yeah, I would love that.