Ipswich 1967

James Brooks made "Ipswich" with paint on canvas. It’s a kind of dance between intention and accident, isn’t it? Look at the way the black paint is applied so thickly in parts, almost like he’s sculpting with it, and then elsewhere it's scraped back or thinned out, revealing glimpses of what lies beneath. It feels like a record of different states of mind, of decisions made and then reconsidered, almost like you can see time passing. Take that single yellow line near the bottom, for instance, it’s so tentative and fragile amidst the bold black and white that it stands out like a moment of quiet contemplation. It speaks to a tension between control and surrender. Like, how much do you plan, and how much do you let the material lead you? Brooks reminds me a bit of Guston, in that way they both allow a kind of raw, unresolved feeling to come through. It's this embrace of ambiguity that makes the work so resonant.