Page 2 - Brook catalogue copy P D F

BROOK
“.........water is the melancholy element, everything is dissolved within it.
The sight of the river can obliterate thought and kill observation, it can even erase memory. It absorbs everything. It can induce sleep and oblivion as well as contemplation”
“It is a sense of being suspended in time: a notion that suggests the slight sway backwards and forwards. It is the almost imperceptible motion of expectation and remembrance, poised between two worlds.............. there are occasions when if you gaze at one spot long enough, so that it seems to detach itself from the flow the flow, then time stops. Is this the quality of timelessness or is it merely an absence, a gap, to which can be attributed no characteristics at all, it is a perplexity...... ‘
The river contains its beginning within its end.” Peter Ackroyd in his book “Thames” :
I am interested in an Ophelia that has become detached from the original fictional narrative and has now become something quite different, free floating; a poetic idea, emblematic, as it moves through generations, constantly evolving through hundreds of new images.
Similarly to the many, many everyday phrases that have passed into our language from this play (to be or not to be – in my minds eye – hoist by his own petard etc etc) so certain images have come to have representational and symbolic meanings in contemporary life that are quite different to their roles in the original play. Ophelia , in these paintings in Brook is neither of one world or another , she is caught in an endless flow , nurtured or maintained by the water rather than menaced by it , there is in the paintings hopefully a feeling of endlessness , a sense of ambiguity which start to open up a space within the canvas that allows the emergence of both space and time. A world to enter; a world that stops this world for just a moment: long enough to remember and to dream and to begin to breathe again.