Marlborough Contemporary is pleased to announce Origins, an exhibition of new works by Jason Brooks.
13 February 2013 – 16 March 2013
Andrew Renton: What have you been painting today?
Jason Brooks: A Tree Trunk, some foliage and a stairgate for my 7 month old daughter.
AR: So – apart from the stair gate – do you paint in small sections? Because there’s so much detail involved, are you able to see the bigger picture while you are working?
JB: I’m always aware of the bigger picture as you’re trying to orchestrate all the smaller components – whether that be harmony or discord. There’s often a process/method involved that centres around the minutiae but within that I’m now trying to surprise myself or be more responsive to elements changing (probably more so than in the past). I remember Chuck Close aligned it to golf: you start with the idea of doing it in the fewest amount of strokes but it often takes more – ultimately you’re just trying to get it in the hole! To be truthful I think it’s all simply a means to an end and it’s purely the finished item that counts.
AR: And that finished item…when you stand back from it, does it surprise you? I’m asking because I always wonder how true to your sources you are – whether it’s a series of photographs or a found painting…
JB: I’m responding to source material in the way Hockney responds to a landscape. I am not making a painting of a photograph. The goal is the finished work, I don’t judge it by it’s fidelity to any of its source material. To that end I’m always surprised – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
AR: But I’m thinking of your landscapes, for example, or any of the works that revisit found paintings rather than photographs. Paintings of paintings, but not in a over-knowing way. Redemptive, almost. I always think they are about love. Love of the landscape which that first painter witnessed, and your love in turn, of that painter who still believes they might be able to capture something in paint…
JB: As the Beatles said, ‘All you need is love’…
