NO SHOW OPENING I: Brooks Wingfield Girsch

NO SHOW OPENING I: Brooks Wingfield Girsch

Brooks was on her way from an artist in Residence at Oxbows Winter Session and on her way to one at the Vermont Studio Center. Luckily for us she passed by the Loft.

Zoe: I was trying to remember what you were explaining to me last night about why you don’t like to show your paintings…?

B: It’s not that I don’t like to show them, there is just that question of what the painting becomes after the process. For me it is so much about the decision making within a single painting and those relationships, so once I’ve resolved them,…it’s hard to say. It’s like I like to work on board so I can stack them when I’m done, so that they are filed away.  I begin with no conception when I start which is probably more important than what I do when it’s done. But as you work on it, it becomes about the success and the failure, especially about the failures, about the inability to achieve. It’s hard for me to talk about my work without talking about how much I love painting and the discipline of painting.

This is tangential but Outsider Artists, that’s sort of a coveted identity now a days, in many cases, are peculiar because they are not achieving, [the work is about] the reaching that’s falling short, and I guess I love going into a small town museum and seeing,…because there is something new that is created in the world though the striving.  Even if in conventional terms it’s a failure or a bad aesthetic, but it just makes something that’s so delicious for me. I think I’m a better draftsman than I am a painter. I don’t always set out to make a shitty painting. It’s not ironic. It literally comes out.

I wouldn’t mind showing [my work] but I just don’t like that it becomes an object, and has a border and is put on a wall and that becomes strange, because its very much a process and very much alive in my studio. And I think that’s a worry for a lot of artists; what happens to the work once it goes into the world. I have the constant feeling that I’m practicing for the next thing, it’s a journey without a goal, so that’s why I’m not concerned with the failure of anything because I’m so tightly involved in a learning process and seeing and a reaction to a decision I make, and one decision necessitates another choice, and yeah it’s like a painting having a conversation with its self and I’m following that. So my big hope is that you would be able to see that struggle in the painting and yeah I think that’s all part of the humor, like you said it was cheesy, but I don’t think cheesy is the right word necessarily, unless you mean a real seriousness that falls flat unintentionally. *