J-1952
James Brooks
JAMES BROOKS, 1953. OIL ON CANVAS MOUNTED ON COMPOSITION BOARD.
James Brooks fought the Second World War with his paintbrush as an official combat artist for the US military, and on his return home, fought a battle with his self through radical, abstract expression. Stationed in Cairo, but deployed across the Middle East and Northern Africa, Brooks would head to the front line of battle, take photographs, and then create paintings, collages, and drawings from these photographs to be submitted to and filed by the military for posterity. The role was not quite that of a documentarian, but it was, by necessity, figurative. So, when he returned to New York and reconnected with his old friend Jackson Pollock, he found freedom and catharsis in distancing himself from the military style of his past. Brooks developed a technique of staining the canvas from the underside, letting the chance operations of thinned oil serve as a basis for his work, and then drawing deliberately atop these stains to create artworks with dual authors - entropy and himself. These painterly accidents provided Brooks with the freedom to explore the repressed and hidden parts of himself in collaboration with a sort of higher power.