Every boldness begs for tenderness

All art is about this thing called rhythm.

What I want and what can I do. What I see in my head doesn’t endure long enough, my initial intentions change in response to my actions, my mind can’t sustain what was envisioned in the face of what’s before me. And then maybe I am then no longer painting but now only solving, I never intended to solve, it is
When I am satisfied, I now only see closure and the journey is erased in my mind, the vicissitudes that took place to get there are no longer conceivable to me anymore. Consistency becomes impossible. It seems to always take so much time to relearn that its not in my hands, there is no easy way to proceed forward or to behave in any such a way where what I aim to achieve is to do something that is out of my hands

“I once asked him why he stopped a particular series of his paintings. You know, he would start a type of painting and keep doing more and more of them until he made one that he thought was the best of the series, and it always was, and then he stopped, and started another series. Why stop, I asked him. "Dead end," he answered. But Stepha [Fernando's wife] once gave me a better explanation: "Your father tries to find God through his paintings. When he realizes that a particular visual concept he's pushing will not get him there, he stops and tries a new concept." So one day I asked him if he believed in God, or at least did he think he could ever find God. He answered, No, of course not, then added, I remember very clearly, "There is no God but the purpose of life is to find him."
[John Gerassi, son of Fernando Gerassi (1899-1974)]
 
(Shared by Tibor Molnar)

"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 what looks good, or done well. It is about the sensibility of the tangible, the feeling about what there is, in the most imaginative sense. Even after it is complete it is not about its completion,
it is about the potential, it is always about the potential, so the end is just a means to the beginning at the start again

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.

In antiquities...., I sense something qualitatively different, the inherent sense of the devotion in the form. I feel a longing to be able to have that devotion, it is the thing that is born out of limitation and exclusivity

I enjoy painting from everyday life, capturing the gist of people before me, the fleeting change of the person within the slower change that surrounds us. I wait watching with my brush hovering for the moment they look back at me watching them, to paint them looking at me from the canvas

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

True winning is in such a way that no one else could even know about it. Because there is a difficult situation in life 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 the state beside it. It can take years to learn how to let go even just a bit, and more time learning to recognise how to let go of almost sooner

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. That everything is and all the while 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

The more you want, the more you loose, the more you try, the more you want. Can one intentionally unlearn something, or do you only learn that you have unlearnt, which feels like the opposite of trying to relive a moment. There are some games in life, in which knowing more and more about them, doesn't bring you any closer to achieving them. I would like to think my aim is to break that realisation

​

​

The objective is that it says something within the most subjective space and be able to say it as best you can. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. The language of painting is words but without words, it says without saying, it is abstraction of meaning, of concreteness, in the most unspecific way. It uses suggestion as its language

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

​

There is something called the audience in your own head, it is a real currency, it is what we most need but that which the world doesn't even realise exists, we have replaced it with some kind of yearning for a real audience. It is not something you can will into existence, it is the most serious feeling of responsibility and call to life you could imagine, which money can't buy

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, it is as complex and sustaining as the human relationship

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

Art is the meeting place of sensitivity and aggression, love must contain some aggression to last.
I see the internal conflict and harmony that sits on a fulcrum.

​

​

#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

Because everything is preemptive. The better you get in your mind, Its because you know what it is that your looking for, and what your not looking for, but this in no way helps you get What your looking for. And then there is less bargaining that we are willing to do, because we are honest with ourselves, we have integrity, the older you get, I cant lie to myself, not in this realm. As time goes on, my expectations gets higher and I find less ways to match my expectations, so the trajectory of the work goes down, and I face more certainly of an impossibly of mind and you get your self really stuck in the corner, and you want more because you feel more, and the want makes it even more impossible because the objective in what it is becomes higher than you. The mind learns more than what you are capable of keeping up with in reality and this is the endless cycle of trying new ways to find a way in, and there is no consistency, and the less you can rely on because, part of that learning is to learn away your guises so you are left with a vision, only a vision of what you want, which entirely escapes you. And this is the start of starting again and again. You know the only thing you have is the fact that you have what others have had, the acquired skill of never being satisfied. - And after all that if and when you are truly satisfied according to yourself, it’s is something that only you know is secretly satisfying and so much so and no one else knows why but you. And this is something that all the money in the world can’t buy, to know you have touched something in yourself, that no one will ever know but you it is the true reward for all your efforts.

The best time to write a song is when your running late to a meeting, and just when the plane touches down and especially when the cabin doors open at the moment when everyone stands up. I like those moments because there is a lot in the room that is being left behind, so I gobble it up

​

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

​

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, 10 hours away or every cm in between. I don’t see how something could make its way approximately everywhere at once. I know why this is but in a way that is hard to understand how

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 a place, not to far away from you. And in that moment it felt like the a feeling of magic. 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 feel the empty back streets around my house as if I was there in a dream state, feeling the night air of the streets.
I didn’t need to be there, it was maybe better than being there, just to know that it was there. I felt that in many places I’d go, it was the sense of feeling alive

To get so comfortable to destroy, to cut your losses so many times in a row, taking risks over something that is possibly already what you intended it to be, but not just not entirely. Learning the meaning of gambling. To win is to surpass your contrition. It is feels like destruction only when you look back, it grabs you. Every time paint goes on, something is 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. It can hurt when you realise that it was the greatest bit nothing you could never have left alone, because you never saw it until it was gone

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

They say there's 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars in each one. Im lost trying to find an unreadable name on a headstone in some forgotten corner of the cemetery, to make the quote for the last living family member who is concerned that no one else will care after her impending passing

Somesay, 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. And painting and drawing teach you how undo this and do the opposite

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 will open my eyes. Painting can be helpful, an engine for capability for now, And which is only just the chance to make a start in a moment, an opening to now. And nevertheless painting is that thing that is all about tomorrow. For me it is 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

One definition of love: It is a feeling that nothing lasts forever

What happens is that drawing and painting are at a constant fight with each other. In both myself and actions. With the first marks of painting, the first five - ten mins are the best part, i’m free I am drawing, and then I know I have to paint over this to make it painting. Because drawing has everything, but only in one sense, in another sense it needs doubt in the way where doubt matters, it matter materially only in painting, a rethinking with consequences and mass, and the stuff where what lasts is that which comes last. The most uninhibited gestures must necessarily be destroyed. And I have to think how I am going to do this in which I either always do what is against my better judgment, in such a way of never trusting myself, or to do it with somehow not doing it myself by surpassing my judgement. And how to surpass that hanging on to what is possibly the best part, as if you hold on it will be of great concern and inconsistency later on. So the whole act is how to circumvent the situation, the situation of what you thought naively was the goal to begin with, or to be in acceptance with an endless cycle of letting go of that very thing, never trusting yourself or your judgement, painting over and over it again.. feigning acceptance in the not trying to give up.

As soon as I hold on to what the work already is, because I like it, but not totally, and also equally have fear in what it is not, the spirt of the act dies, so I can see that I may never get anywhere right then, so it must be destroyed to keep going. Im trying to do something in which my mission has an self contradiction at the heart of getting there.. but sometimes I get there, but I never know how. You can’t trick yourself even unknowingly, with any short cuts, because it always says I am a unwitting short cut.

But a drawing does none of this mostly the opposite.. I feel like most often a drawing is Iike the first 5 mins of a painting that goes forever. And to paint like your draw takes this kind of continual self renewal which is another word for continued destruction which in some cases never end in painting, just you decided to end it, and start again, or you knew that this one is worth pursuing, you never know it was worth pursuing until you know you could possibly win and won, there really is a moment when it wakes up, it is a very exciting time because you know that sometimes it happens, and it happens so suddenly, you say I won that right there so there’s a chance. Its like painting gives you nothing and then only everything, it is a win or loose all or nothing situation in paint. And drawing gives you everything for nothing. And the goal is to make painting and drawing one thing. So sometimes I have tried to paint in such a way that is bad. Missing all the gestures I think i want, I paint bad in the hope that what happens is inconsequential to my aim, and it doesn’t work, it’s not suppose to work, this is start of a type of freedom. And this is not seen from any of my paintings, because I believe I hardly paint in the way I think I should be painting, I never have been able to yet. I think I don’t have the courage to paint, I have never been able to say so. Because I would have to, really have to not want what I think I want, maybe somehow not be me, while being me. How can one want so something so much, and make that happen while not wanting at all.

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

To paint a portrait of my Mum from a drawing I did from a photo.. this was my issue: I knew if I couldn’t draw her there was a fat chance of doing it in paint, so I needed a drawing, as a drawing distills what it is, it is the essential of depiction. I drew her and drew her from this photo and I could almost say it was impossible to get a drawing that felt like her to me. Even when all the lines lined up in the right places it failed to have any resemblance to her.. I tried so many way of thinking about how to do this, mental ways, I turned the image upside down, I thought of only outlines and capturing strictly, or only shades, drawing fast sketches and also slow drawings, for so many hours over 2 weeks and ways. When I got to see each drawing there was just nothing there that was her, but i did in the end get 2 drawings, that got I would honestly say were 5-10 percent of her.. so these drawings were of a million other people, of people I would have meet in another universes but was not her.. I don’t think it’s because I can’t draw.. I think I can draw to some extent, I have been going to drawing classes recently for weeks drawing from models 4 hours sessions I’ve been drawing for years I know not why, I could not capture her.. I don’t think I know how to draw.
I heard the brain thinks about faces differently to the perception of other things, faces are not seen in piece meal, broken down part by part to tell you this is this person, we have an entire complex mental machinery when it comes to decoding faces more than all other objects in our world. I thought maybe this is the thing that’s causing me issues this highly developed left brain architecture of the mind, and I need to turn it off, de-objectify my mum’s face from myself in my mind. It’s nothing but shapes of course. I had no problem capturing the blooming yellow and red flowers across her dress… but I wasn’t able to get my mind not to be itself. I then I also realised that what I wanted even if it could be a likeness of the photos would not be what I wanted in a painting, to capture likeness would not be what worked for a painting, what I wanted in paint would have nothing to do with what is in that photo, a particular visage only of what it was I could see it. And she was smiling in that photo and I wanted to capture her smiling and I’ve always tended to find that very hard. The realm of the smile, is very difficult for me. Fran’s Hals could do it, I tried it was awkward, was I that unlearned, un-trained after so many years or was I too learned much, did I need a I perform lobotomy ? I also knew that I have come to an aversion of thin paint, I just can’t do that, I needed liberty to use paint to be paint not a coating a vernier that seemingly meets all at once. The paint is stale and clumpy and awkward and resists doing anything. It’s acts in such a way to make people look like cavemen because everything is far from clean and easy going. And how could I do that do my mum who has aged so beautifully with the delicate aspects shown in that photo, to turn her into a cave painting.. I tried and feel a deep need to do this, to paint her as a sign of my love. How could I live up to that. I ask myself, I am dumb enough, to to do something in which everything says its at odds with what I am trying, I am not using my strengths but my weaknesses at the starting point. Or am I just dogged enough to keep doing something I know for all the reasons I know, all of them

Art is the meeting place of sensitivity and aggression, true love must contain some aggression to last.
The actions of ideas become the ideas of actions and a play or a march is the other way around

"Never put off for tomorrow, what you can do today" my ambition is to undo this, it has taken hold of so much in my system and it is not special, it is the default of the world we live in, it is a saying for the masses, it eats away at the thing that has no start or end, that which is not worth doing and are possibly undoable

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

​

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. There are so many orders of operations, this is just one. Sometimes there is no where to start from, the entire canvas is everything as once. There are so many modalities, if I can perfect this one corner, it is a painting with in painting, and sometimes there are no parts or wholes. The tiniest drop of paint can do so much and sometimes many litres are eviscerated to make way

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 And myself 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)

It is to refuse not to be able to have the chance to take a look of what you think could be seen again. A type of refusing to let go of what you believed you thought you have imagined, but which you know you never saw, a determination not let go of what is invisible to you

Too serious and too flippant, how to avoid this and find neither in what is, begging too much, dumbing this down, getting it out of your system, persistence like a dog for doggish 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, I feel like I can then seeing things from the inside. Once I nearly spilled paint all over the old carpet of a UNESCO world heritage site, I was painting there and no one said anything, I wondering what would have happened if that happened. Another time my kids nearly broke a bunch of John Perceval and Arthur Boyd potteries displayed waist high and haphazardly, I wondered what would have happened

I want more than I can handle. I bit off in my mind more than I can chew in the world. And this is a series of indecisions, mistakes and inactions, frustrations and failures but I somehow believe in myself that its possible and sometimes I get a glimmer of hope again from my efforts or from my abstinences and the engine fires up over and I believe I will make it happen again

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 our home, that particular space has contained for us so much, a mini world.
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 the darkness and light which forms from itself and their opposites. You need to feel what it’s like, 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

I have realised that the state of longing is superior to the state of fulfilment.
It is not strange to know this, but not easy to feel 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, there are as many variables as there are things in the world. All of psychology is on the side of the brush before it touches anything and more so afterwards. All epistemology and ontology is there when you look in and look away

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 moment and try and come up with the answer