Every boldness begs for tenderness

All art is about this thing called rhythm.

What I want and what’s possible for me to do, across artworks and of the one work. I want what I see in my head, but what I see doesn’t endure long enough, my mind modifies itself as response to my actions, My mind can’t sustain what it envisioned in the face of what’s before me. I’m forced to make solutions as the only way forward of what became a self generated puzzle. And when it works out, I only see the solution, the journey has undergone an erasure within mind, it’s not accessible anymore. So wanting the same outcome of work becomes impossible. For some this dichotomy is broad for some it is narrower, but you know its not in your hands, and you don’t want it to be in your hands

"In my view you must either do away with ornament or make ornament the essence.
It's not something you add. It's not icing on a cake. It's everything - or it's nothing."
Jean-Antoine Watteau

It is not about a knack of what looks good,
it is about the sensibility of the tangible, the feeling about what there is, in the most imaginative sense. Even after the work is complete it is not about its completion,
it's about the potential, it was always about the potential

One inspiration that planted a certain emotion in me at a young age and has never entirely left, was from the 1960s movie The Time Machine of H. G. Wells. It was the story of a man, who locked himself away and through invention was able to transcend his present reality with a mechanism that worked but is never explained. This gave me the notion that by pure thought and obsession a person who locked himself away from the world was able to venture and access something that was not in plain sight. It is this childish and naive sense that I think still drives me, a kind of internal adventure.

I am drawn to art antiquities, which is a broad term. I am drawn from South Asia to the West Indies, I find the works of art in history museums the most...., I sense something qualitatively different in these works of art, the inherent sense of the devotion in the form. I feel a longing to be able to have that devotion, for me it would be born out of limitation and exclusivity

I enjoy painting from everyday life, capturing the gist of people in the scene. Often I wait and watch, with my brush hovering for the moment they look back at me watching them looking at me in the painting.

Hole in the Fence:
Making art is about searching, about looking for a translative moment, a hole in the fence,
about trying to stand close to the fastest and dirtiest train the world has ever known

Never trying to resolve, trying is not good, resolving is not good.
Either it's on or it's not on, when it's on, it means winning.
True winning is in such a way that no one else could even know about it.
There is a difficult situation called almost, almost everything is almost, sometimes things can live for years in a place of almost, and there is no way to take it forward, and you live in this state beside it. It can take years to learn how to let go even just a bit, and even more time to learn how to begin doing so faster and so tomorrow to let go a bit deeper

There is border, a line somewhere in my mind. On one side permanence of the object, truth, art, on the other side, nihilism and meaninglessness.
Things feels real to me but i'm aware of the claws behind, and that each is the antidote to the other

Because all is relational,
a single dot has the power to change everything. Painting is to present the whole instantaneously, a total totality.

Standing in the driveway mixing mortar for a 60 year old sandstone wall when I hear a piecing roar approaching and see five silvery jets forming an arrowhead shoot past in seconds out of sight.
I feel im in the past and the future simultaneously, they are both pressing, they step on each others toes and im

the more you want, the more you loose, the more you try, the more you want

When you try to intentionally unlearn something, a way of thinking, a mental crutch, on how to do things, you have only learnt what you have unlearnt, its like the opposite of trying to relive a moment

Taking its time.
Don’t want to know it just having seen it
Want to see if it has a story many years after
It could be shy or bold, and it can ask you questions,
and takes one year to tell you the answer
I want the painting to be passive.
So that what is first silent says the most

Painting is words without any words, as abstraction of meaning, with no rules of formalism. The objective is that it says something within the most subjective space and be able to say it well. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, that is where good paintings live, in the place of speaking silence

Opening speech for 2018 Exhibition.
By JOHN CRUTHERS.

The first painting by David Brook I saw was in a group exhibition in Bondi in 2008. I was impressed and soon after we met and David showed me some of his Life Paintings. They were depictions of the eastern suburbs – streets and houses, parks, corners of the harbour, everyday life. I’ve always liked this kind of work, which has a long history in 20th-century Australian art. Russian émigré Danila Vassilief painted the streets of urban Fitzroy in the 1930s and 40s and influenced a generation of artists including Nolan, Tucker, and Perceval. Or the Swiss Sali Hermann, who was known as the terrace house painter for his depictions of Paddington, at that time a slum. It’s an approach that still appeals to artists like Tom Carment or Noel McKenna, or David.

...So it’s about achieving a different vision, of selecting and combining events and visual details into a summary of the experience or view that prompted the painting. The end result is paintings that remake the everyday world, allowing us to see the familiar in a different, richer, more intense way.

I’d like to finish with a brief comment on the role of people in David’s paintings. You notice pretty quickly that David’s human subjects nearly always have their eyes closed. When I asked about this, he said he was more interested in depicting people looking within that staring out at the viewer. He is interested in inner worlds, but evoked using the outer world as a scaffold on which to build a sense of experience, feeling, and emotion into the painting.

So these paintings of landscapes, cities, and people are also about something entirely different. They are about states of mind, about energy, about the ecstatic experience, about a universe humming and buzzing with life force. They offer something unique, and I urge you to take it up, to do as Robert MacPherson implored at the end of his series Little pictures for the poor: “Enquire within”.
-
John Cruthers is a Sydney-based art consultant, curator, writer and collector. He is a curator of the Grundy Collection of Australian art and curatorial adviser of the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art at the University of Western Australia.

Where there's light there's shadow,
there's shadow in the light
and light in the shadow.
#painting from #life.

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I don't know if one needs a real audience, if you are blessed to find the audience in your own head,
that is a real feeling to find it there waiting for you

There are no magic solutions to making art, no approach that is guaranteed to work a second time. There is no clear way of seeing the ramifications of decisions until they are actually made. It is this unknowing and discovery that keeps drawing me in.

Art is the meeting place of sensitivity and aggression.
True love must contain some aggression to last.
I see the internal conflict and harmony within every heraldry

Paintings that sit on a delicate fulcrum.

Often when I wake up in the middle of the night, I go to the window and listen to the soft sound of sirens

Rushing to the plane
that i'm boarding now,
guide dogs dancing
across the runway
Waiting to get off the plane
waiting for the movable bridge, watching the water galloping down

#today I carved this head when my teacher wasn't looking.

You will get to know your painting if you sleep with it in your room.
When you lie down and wake up. You see it in ways that you can’t see
when you're going about your everyday life

I spend a lot of time staring at the painting and painting it in my mind to avoid mistakes, trying this and that.
It can involve any aspect of the image, the dots or the lines that could be, which direction should they go, which area, what size, how I’m going to hide this part, etc. Sectioning parts off in the mind by putting a blind eye on certain aspects. There are so many variables, sometimes it was the right approach, and other times I can’t imagine it at all, so I have to paint it and see what it really looks like. It’s hard to hold so many moves in your head, that it’s not unlike chess. Once you make the right move the next step becomes clearer, some times you can make the wrong move or many of them. Your opponent doesn't let you take your move back

All music is about death.

Shake the can until it turns cold then press very gently 
and let little specks shoot out to create for yourself a globular cluster

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The best time to write a song is when your running late to a meeting,
and after touch down when the cabin doors open, right at the moment when everyone stands up
I like those moments because there is a lot of now in the room that has been left behind, so I gobble it up as quick as I can

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The pursuit of turning nothing into something and something to nothing, which never's ends, it is like a heaven and a hell

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I went to journey outside to paint but when I got there,
I realised that I forgot to bring brushes
So I chewed on sticks to paint with but it didn’t go so good

I bite my tongue and then my tongue tastes itself

My friend says..
“an art exhibition is like a book launch but where everyone reads the book in front of you”

What is light..When I look at a star, I know that my eyes could see that star anywhere, say 10 hours drive from here, if so what is it that is making its way to my eye, whether I'm standing here, over there 10 hours away and every cm in between. I don’t see how something could make its way approximately everywhere at once. I understand how it works in such a way that I dont understand

When I was young I used to get this feeling,
and only sometimes I have it now but rarely.
It is having a feeling for the place, not to far away from you
And in that moment it is like magic when you got it.
I remember being in school looking out the window of my class room
and seeing the tops of trees in the park across the road,
I would feel what it was like to be there and then, without being there.
At night in bed, I could sense it in the empty back streets around my neighbourhood.
I could feel what it was like out there in the night air of the streets.
I didn’t need to be there just to know that it was there.
I felt that in many places I’d go, this sense of feeling alive.

Do you know how hard it is to destroy.. to take risks over something that is possibly already what you intended it to be. Painting is learning the meaning of gambling, to win you have to learn how to surpass your contrition, to show your knee to yourself. The only way to surpass this is to look forward, if you look back then you feel the destruction and its harder to go on.

Every time paint goes on, something is also destroyed, even if it is nothing, it is destroyed. It is no longer nothing and that nothing has been taken away and now that piece of nothing is impossible to get back. I slap myself when I realise that was the greatest bit nothing I could never have left alone as I never saw it until it was gone.

I need to to be so giving, but giving is believing. And scale in not about scale. It is a play between quality and quantity, they go though each other like the peaks and troughs of waves. Conception of form is entirely unique as it is non fractal

They say there's 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars in each one.
Im lost trying to find a unreadable name on a headstone
In some forgotten corner of the cemetery for the

Seeing is so entwined with understanding, what you understand is what you see
This way round. If you don’t know, you don’t really see.
Some people see more than I can imagine

Just to be normal we are expected to be paradoxical

What Kabbalah says about the empty space, the spiritual worlds.
Where are they.. they are nowhere specifically, which is that they are everywhere and right now with you in the room. I often find that right now is hard.. I say tomorrow I will try open my eyes.
Painting can be helpful, a capability for now, which is only just the chance to make a start in a moment. And nevertheless painting is that thing that is about tomorrow. The thing that makes everything that is not the thing worthwhile

Never lose sight of
the vision of your
daydream reflection
notion cousin.

Like the apple core in the middle of the road and the moonshine by day.
And the paint that makes its way from the back of my hand to my shirt and then onto yours. I will be here for you

Love is a feeling that nothing lasts forever

Feel a thousand night airs between the cats and moon. sdfsdf
Living in a world of words and people, going faster than they have ever been before.

If you paint the trees before the skies
or the sky before the trees, there is a difference

I'm imaging a sunset on a moon, which are both setting on another sun, with a fiery storm of on the surface which reflects two birds flying south in a sky of stars and a moon with a sun setting on another moon with those fiery stars above

Making art is about the actions of ideas becoming the ideas of actions
and a play or a march is the other way around

Patience is not a virtue.. "Never put off for tomorrow, what you can do today" this is the worst advise I have heard, this is the human default, takes years of practice to go beyond this, to be able to do what is harder but more important

Unless love loves you it doesn’t feel like love

The feeling of what the night will be is more important than what the night will become

Every colour promises to resolve, to be the secret answer, if ones commits, it will commit. A certain glowing blue can appear like the truth. Black is like the father and white is like the mum, muddy yellow is like a brother, everyone else like people you meet at the party

The landscape existed first, people come into the landscape and they can walk out of it. People come at the end of a painting, they are placed above the previous paint

Unsure what these dots are, when I make them I feel like I’m in a therapy session, I feel the brush in my hand is starting to be digested into the world

​“An amateur is someone who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.” (Ben Shahn)

To refuse not to be able to have the chance to take a glimpse of what you think could be seen again. Refusing to let go of what you believed you thought you imagined, but never saw, not willing to let go of the invisible

Too serious, too flippant, how to find neither in what is. 
Begging too much, dumbing it down, getting it out of your system, persistence like a dog for doggish dreams or fairy dreams.
Finding no happy meeting place between self-deprecation and a self fulfilling prophecy to be able to find a way with it

It’s taken me 10 years of looking at my son and drawing him multiple times to see how the eye socket curves in suddenly between the forehead and the upper cheek bone. I never knew and now I see it everywhere and I think of him often, because for me his is the greatest curve of all, he is the quintessential model of this in my mind now

The Rebbe told: Once there was a young man who traveled through many distant countries in search of a master craftsman from whom he could learn a trade. After a while he returned home and announced to his family that he had become an expert designer of chandeliers. “I have become so talented in my new-found trade,” he explained, “that my work far surpasses even the greatest masterpieces of my teacher.” Then, realizing that the family was a bit dubious about the measure of his success, he asked his father to invite the leading chandelier craftsmen in the city to view a sample of his own creation.
 
The craftsmen came and carefully examined the young man’s work. They all agreed that they had never before laid eyes on such a monstrosity. “It’s a disgrace to our entire profession,” said one, “though this particular piece right here is quite good.” “It’s absolutely hideous,” said another, “but that particular piece over there is excellent.” “It should be burned,” said a third, “so that others need not suffer the experience. However,” he added, “that piece there is perfection itself.”
 
When they had gone, the young man approached his father and said, “Now you know that I was not exaggerating at all, I am indeed the master of all master craftsmen.” His father looked at him in bewilderment. “What do you mean?” he exclaimed. “You heard their conversation, your chandelier is a monstrosity!”
 
“I heard,” replied the young man. “However, did you notice that each of the craftsmen admired a particular piece of my work, but no two craftsmen admired the same piece. For when I was abroad I studied the work of each of these men. Then I decided to make a chandelier which combined all of their imperfections. Today you saw every craftsman recognize the imperfections of his associates, while pointing to his own mistake and seeing it as nearly perfect.”
 
Rebbe Nachman concluded this parable by stating:
 
“If a man could know all the possible imperfections and shortcomings of a given thing, then he would also know the exact makeup and appearance of that same thing in its perfect state, though he had never seen it before.”

(From: breslev.com )

Sometimes it feels like we are all 3 people in this story, the son, the father and craftsmen.

I don't like the feeling of being a tourist, to go around and stare in a way of passing through. I feel better going into the place and painting it, like i'm seeing things from the inside. Once I nearly spilled paint all over the old carpet of a UNESCO world heritage site, I was wondering what would have happened. Another time my kids nearly broke a bunch of Perceval and Boyd potteries displayed waist high haphazardly,

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A hangover is an organisms act of rebellion against itself, it can help you be aware of the joy of being alive, in a deep sense, you come back from the dead, and you feel a pleasure in simply: just to be, but we forget and forget this over again

​Thinking about how somebody we live our lives in a certain location, we spend parts of our lives in certain spaces, a place within out home, that particular space has contained us so much, its a mini world.
And then when we move through space, we travel in the car we span whole houses so quickly in seconds, it feels like flying though worlds

There was a Sidney Nolan exhibition on at the AGNSW. There was a printed brochure. On the cover was a photograph of Nolan in the studio and far in the background was painting leaning up against something. I was inspired by that tiny bit on the brochure, say was the width of thumbnail,
Another time I parked in my car as I was picking up my wife, and looked into the window of a restaurant, at the back of a side wall I saw an some wall art. It appeared to me to be a painting of a woman standing on a windy beach, with a dark blue ocean above her and a sky above, from the top of the sky was a huge dog leaping down with its paws outstretched above her. Seems interesting to me that I decided to go and see this up close, as I approached the image, it started to disassemble and suddenly I was looking at a generic print of a rose

You know when your in the shower and both the hot water and cold water are running but it’s either too hot or too cold and you need to turn one up or one down, and you have to decide, it’s like that sometimes in drawing, you choose where to take it, all of your darkness and lights form from themselves and their opposites. You need to feel what it’s like just to it’s like being in the midst of that hot and cold shower

Wedding after seeing a quote from hitler: ”Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized”.

I receive the Art Spectrum prize, and smelling the saffron oil, I stick my thumb into the Naples yellow, it is my colour of the asphalt road in the sun

Strange to realise that the state of longing is superior to the state of fulfilment.
Really its not so strange to know this, but its something when you feel it that its true

Found a place called Johnson’s lookout, looking down over all those trees, seeing pale yellow-greens, warm yellow-greens, copper yellow-greens, neon yellow-greens, suicide bomber greens, blood greens, bright red greens, light blue-greens, white glowing greens, purple greens, red black greens, cobalt greens, turquoise greens, purply blue-greens, navy greens, 70's greens, warm brown greens, space blue greens…

There is feeling for the place I am, even when i’m painting only just down the road, and that feeling of the sense of place can sometimes last for hours afterward

Won a bid on ebay for a heater, which was in the Northern Beaches, so we made a day of it, we got the heater and went to the beach and I started painting there. Phthalo blue has to be the most saturated paint around, so don’t forget to put the lid on it tightly because for me it went everywhere.
I kept getting this feeling maybe because of where I was standing, that there was always someone standing behind me and watching me and I’d turn around and there was no one there. But its funny to see that when one person stands and watches you painting, I notice it makes more people do the same. And you really have to make the painting work when that happens. People talk to me and I'm happy to talk back but I just keep painting as I find i'm able to catch some wave during those moments

Westfield
June 2010

​At the Westfield shopping centre in the Junction. Painted on the top floor with Steven Durbach. Looking down. I always loved this idea of painting around such an environment because of the advertisements of giant people in sunglasses, and women in poses. After about 25 mins was approached by the security guards, ".. your not allowed to paint there, unless you have a special permit...” so we had to pack up and leave, sadly a few days later a guy committed suicide from that top level

There is so much to learn from painting.. I am starting to see everything in life is in there, and there are as many variables as there are things in the world. All of psychology is on every side of the brush before it touches anything, and even more so afterwards. All the epistemology and ontology is there when you look in and look away

How to stand up and make a decision.. wading through the quagmire of inner apathy for a true life of art. When the simple fact of returning missed calls moves real worlds. To see or to want to see, that is the question. To want to see is not indulgent, it is to commit, beyond what it is to feel what feels right, it is to be acted upon if one has the sense of responsibility to the truth of the moment and try and come up with the answer