John Brooks
I See This Echoing
April 13–May 28, 2022
For the past two years, John Brooks has asked dozens of friends and acquaintances, but also total strangers, to sit for him while he makes their photograph. These sessions have taken place in Andros, Aspen, Athens, Miami Beach, New York, Southampton, and beyond. Occasionally, when time or distance does not allow, he will instruct the sitter on how to position and photograph themselves, all in preparation for the single drawing he will make of them at his studio in the Portland neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky. The only common thread among his subjects is a distinct point of connection–something as banal as an Instagram like or as profound as shared history... read more
Detail of John Brooks, Me & I, 2022, graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper, 50 x 38.5 inches.
John Brooks
The Night Will Always Win, 2022
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
John Brooks
A Skippidy Doo Da Day (2002), 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
38.5 x 50 inches
John Brooks
Mother Will Never Understand Why You Had to Leave, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
John Brooks
A cuckoo sings to me
to the mountain to me
to the mountain.
–Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
John Brooks
Cincinnati, I Like the Word, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
“One senses that, in (Brooks’) vibrant canvases, redolent with desire and with the search for companionship in the past and present, Brooks is meditating on a future that isn’t quite his own, or not yet, and that he’s painting to catch up with it.”
–Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker, 2021
John Brooks
Makes Me Wish I Was Empty, 2022
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
John Brooks
A Saxophone Someplace Far Off Played, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
John Brooks
Nothing’s Gonna Touch You in These Golden Years, 2022
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
John Brooks
A clear moon
because of his fear of foxes
I go with my lover boy.
–Matsuo Bashō, (1644-1694), 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Detail of John Brooks, A Skippidy Doo Da Day (2002), 2021, graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper, 38.5 x 50 inches.
John Brooks
We Two Boys Together Clinging, 2022
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
John Brooks
Before I Caught Your Coldness, 2022
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
John Brooks
She’s Got Everything She Needs, She’s an Artist, She Don’t Look Back, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
John Brooks
Live This Day, 2021
Graphite colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
John Brooks
Of course there is nothing wrong with the stars
It is my emptiness among them
While they drift farther away in the invisible morning
–W.S. Merwin, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year
By W. S. Merwin
It sounds unconvincing to say When I was young
Though I have long wondered what it would be like
To be me now
No older at all it seems from here
As far from myself as ever
Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing
I imagine all the clocks have died in the night
Now no one is looking I could choose my age
It would be younger I suppose so I am older
It is there at hand I could take it
Except for the things I think I would do differently
They keep coming between they are what I am
They have taught me little I did not know when I was young
There is nothing wrong with my age now probably
It is how I have come to it
Like a thing I kept putting on as I did my youth
There is nothing the matter with speech
Just because it lent itself
To my uses
Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars
It is my emptiness among them
While they drift farther away in the invisible morning
John Brooks
Beiruti, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
John Brooks
I Used to Be Free, I Used to Be Seventeen, 2022
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
John Brooks
Ammunition, 2022
Colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
John Brooks
Pa Pa Power, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Detail of John Brooks, I Used to Be Free, I Used to Be Seventeen, 2022, graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper, 50 x 38.5 inches.
John Brooks
Me & I, 2022
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
John Brooks
a smooth round stone as small as a world and as large as alone, 2022
Graphite, colored pencil on paper
50 x 33.5 inches
John Brooks
The Ghost In You, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
John Brooks
A Man Lost in Time Near KaDeWe, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
John Brooks
She’s So Busy Being Free, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
“Above all else, I am interested in emotional resonance, the transmission and residue of emotion or experience or feeling.”
–John Brooks
John Brooks
I See This Echoing
April 13–May 28, 2022
For the past two years, John Brooks has asked dozens of friends and acquaintances, but also total strangers, to sit for him while he makes their photograph. These sessions have taken place in Andros, Aspen, Athens, Miami Beach, New York, Southampton, and beyond. Occasionally, when time or distance does not allow, he will instruct the sitter on how to position and photograph themselves, all in preparation for the single drawing he will make of them at his studio in the Portland neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky. The only common thread among his subjects is a distinct point of connection—something as banal as an Instagram like or as profound as shared history.
Brooks—artist, poet, and curator—is an active member of Louisville’s creative community but has largely relied on social media and long-distance communication for inspiration. Friendly DMs have grown into ongoing dialogues, enabled by what Brooks calls “the whims of the algorithm.” Beiruti is the result of one such conversation, born from a friendship forged on Instagram through discussions of architecture, politics, and queerness. In the cases where Brooks meets his online subjects in person, they are already familiars, the connection equally and often more powerful than physical nearness. This concept is reinforced in A Skippidy Doo Da Day (2002), a portrait of Brooks’ late grandfather that records a true connection despite the subject’s absence. Through Brooks’ hand, the virtual and physical are inseparable, reconciled in a realm where distant connections, local landscapes, and wistful memories may coexist.
Brooks’ studio is full of these mostly larger-than-life portraits, an imagined community created by an artist at home in solitude yet fascinated by connection. Within each work lies layers of shared experience; the indulgent or humorous is reconciled with the profound. They are collaborative, a combination of what is offered and what is recorded, requiring the artist’s willingness to surrender his hand to the experience of others and the subject’s desire to express themselves truthfully and entirely. Brooks approaches this process with great reverence, distilling personal histories, pleasure, loss, and desire into oversized frames.
The scale of the drawings is both joyful and unsettling, ultimately allowing for a deeper immersion in the artist’s world. Far larger than any smartphone or computer screen, these are not images to peer into, but to meet head-on. Similarly, their creation demands the artist’s entire presence, the mark-making alluding to full-body gestures and constant motion. Brooks’ marks swell and break like waves or music, dense yet easeful. The gentle palette affirms an underlying nostalgia, one powered by the longing that inspired such scenes. Brooks’ connections float upon the page, preserved in a realm separate from our own, where connection transcends time and space.
John Brooks was born in central Kentucky in 1978. He studied Political Science and English Literature at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, with continuing education in art at Central St. Martins and the Hampstead School of Art in London, England. His work has been exhibited across the United States and Europe, and is included in the collections of the 21C Museum Hotels, Grinnell College Museum of Art, among others. Most recently, Garth Greenwell penned a feature article about Brooks for the The New Yorker titled “A Kentucky Painter’s Travels in Queer Time.”
UnderMain
June 14, 2022
Review: John Brooks NYC
By Boshko Boshkovic
brutjournal
June 3, 2022
From Golf To Glowing: John Brooks’s Luminous Portraits Make A Vital Connection
By Edward M. Gómez
WFPL
May 13, 2022
Artistic inspiration and national recognition coalesce for Louisville visual artist John Brooks
By Stephanie Wolf
Whitewall
May 5, 2022
John Brooks Echoes a Love of Subjects, Process, Queerness
By Andrew Huff
Inquire
John Brooks
The Night Will Always Win, 2022
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
Inquire
Inquire
John Brooks
A cuckoo sings to me
to the mountain to me
to the mountain.
–Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
Cincinnati, I Like the Word, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
Makes Me Wish I Was Empty, 2022
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
A Saxophone Someplace Far Off Played, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
A clear moon
because of his fear of foxes
I go with my lover boy.
-Matsuo Bashō, (1644-1694), 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
Nothing’s Gonna Touch You in These Golden Years, 2022
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
We Two Boys Together Clinging, 2022
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
Live This Day, 2021
Graphite colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
Before I Caught Your Coldness, 2022
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
She’s Got Everything She Needs, She’s an Artist, She Don’t Look Back, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
Of course there is nothing wrong with the stars / It is my emptiness among them / While they drift farther away in the invisible morning – W.S. Merwin, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
Beiruti, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
I Used to Be Free, I Used to Be Seventeen, 2022
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
Ammunition, 2022
Colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
Pa Pa Power, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
a smooth round stone as small as a world and as large as alone, 2022
Graphite, colored pencil on paper
50 x 33.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
Me & I, 2022
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
The Ghost In You, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
A Man Lost in Time Near KaDeWe, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
She’s So Busy Being Free, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
Blue Band, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches
Inquire
John Brooks
La Ritournelle, 2021
Graphite, colored pencil, pastel on paper
50 x 38.5 inches