Brooke McGowen
Shingletown, California
I paint by squirting the paint directly out of the bottle, encouraging the paint's flowing motion. The intended figure is subjected to the ravages of chance.
MessageBorn in Chicago in 1953, her parents students at the University of Chicago, Brooke early decided to become an artist. She studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago then changed her focus and studied Physics. Her love of Physics continues to this day where she applies the effects of Fluid Dynamics in her painting.
In 1972 she went to Vienna, Austria, where she attended the Art Academy. It was here that she came into contact with Viennese Actionism and the Material Actions in which paint is used as material. She lived and worked in Munich for several years and then moved to Portugal where she applied vibrant colors in her landscape painting.
In 2008 she moved to New York City where she worked with street artists under the name “Sprezanne”. Shortly thereafter she founded Radical Art Initiative, a collaboration of artists to create visuals for social and environmental actions in New York City. She worked with 350.org and other organizations with actions such as drawing the 2100 high water line on the sidewalk of Lower Manhattan with blue paint.
Being in numerous group shows in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side gave her the chance to exchange ideas with other artists and reinforced her certainty that the new direction in painting requires the unification of abstraction and figuration.
In 2011 she moved to Peekskill, just north of New York City. Here she was able to perfect her signature method of squirting paint directly from plastic bottles onto the canvas and then gently tilting it at an angle. This method allows the paint to swirl at will. Color elements combine to suggest a figurative situation.
In 2017 she published an art book, “The Waterdrinkers”, funded through Kickstarter.
In 2018 she moved to a remote area of Northern California.
She participated in residencies at the M.David Gallery in Brooklyn in 2019 and at the 18th St. Art Center in Los Angeles in 2022.
She was chosen for a solo booth at the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York in 2022 and in Los Angeles in 2022 and 2023.
Statement
I loved to paint from a very young age. It gave me a feeling of empowerment and freedom. I decided as a child that I would become a painter.
I studied painting, first at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, then at the Academy of Applied Art in Vienna, Austria. There the students received a classical education with life drawing in the style of Klimt and Sciele.
Becoming aware of the Viennese Actionism movement let me see paint as a material that expresses itself through its inherent qualities. The Abstract Expressionist movement was also pathbreaking for me. Following the lead of De Kooning, Pollock, Krasner and others, I wanted to unleash the freedom of the paint on a figurative situation.
My goal was to create a painting that was abstract and figurative at the same time. It was possible to imagine a painting where the color elements could freely expand in an abstract composition but simultaneously evoke a figurative situation.
Discovering Cezanne and the use of color elements to create space was a revelation for me. I began to use the spatial position of color elements to construct a figurative situation. This method permitted a greater freedom for the paint to unfold its inherent energy.
I gradually discarded my paintbrushes as I found new ways to apply paint that would facilitate the paint’s natural tendency to flow and converge.
Instead of using controlled brushstrokes, I began squirting the paint directly out of the bottle onto the canvas. This method made it impossible to predict the paint’s fluid motion.
By allowing the color elements to move and interact, random combinations and patterns emerge.
The momentum of the paint following the laws of fluid dynamics renders the outcome uncertain. The surprise effect of the flowing paint opens the figurative situation to new interpretations, revealing hidden psychic dimensions.
The juxtaposition of paint swirls with figures and landscapes creates a situation which is implied but not defined.
The viewer is the interlocutor, using their own life experience to decode the scene.
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