Interview: Flo Brooks

My friend Flo Brooks is an artist who paints plumbing, tubes, holes, blobs, squiggles, appliances, work, everyday spaces, past and present; there is no part of the substance of queer and trans life that is off limits. Everything is jumbled together, fractured, turned around in his art, things look simultaneously hyper-real and fantastical, I want to spend time with its gorgeous complexity.

Animals are an important part of Flo’s visual language. They appear as commentators in his larger works and also as figures in their own right. Flo’s practice includes portraits of people’s animal companions, the more-than-human comrades of a queered household. He told me recently that he is doing more of these and is available for commissions.

Indeed, Flo’s painting of my ginger tom has sat in prime position in my front room for so long now. It’s been years since the cat died but here my man is ready to dart and pounce, his eyes shine, he is placed amidst a brutalist structure referencing a toy I made for him, he has a bright blue outline, especially on his tail, that makes him buzz with electrical energy. I look at that painting most days and discover new things in it all the time. I love and miss that cat but the image gives me such pleasure; it is perfect.

I wanted to know more about how a painting gets made so I asked Flo, who generously agreed to an interview.

I’m interested in the dull nuts and bolts of how a painting happens. Do you have a whole stash of paints, brushes and boards?

I have boxes of acrylic paints, gouache, some watercolour, divided by colour. I have all the paints I use on a daily basis on top of a table with jars and small piles of paintbrushes, rags, pencils, masking tape. I paint onto plywood mostly, or canvas, and I have big rolls and sheets in my studio that I can cut up when I want.

Do you spend a lot of time at art supplies shops?

No, I actually don’t spend a lot of time in art supplies shops. Art supplies are expensive so it’s a bit dangerous, there are always new things I see that I’d quite like to try! There is a small, ok but quite expensive shop near where I live, where I pick up stationeries and things like that, and then I get most of my supplies from Jacksons.

What are your preferences for materials and equipment?

I have certain brands I continually use and trust, and my preferences are all the usual things: good quality, sustainable / ethical credentials where possible, vegan, on the more affordable end.

How do you start?

Hmm…it’s hard to know when it starts… One way to describe it would be that I usually sit in my studio procrastinating until I get too frustrated with myself and have to do something. A lot of planning and figuring out goes on before I even pick up a paintbrush. Sitting with an idea, refining it, sketching, refining sketches, making them into collages, refiguring, skewing, distorting and taking those images apart, refining again. I want a framework but I need spontaneity too. It depends on the project of course, and how I’m feeling. I start painting when I keep returning to the collage/s and it’s intriguing or exciting and it feels enough to get going.

When do you know it’s done

It’s done when I come back into my studio and nothing is niggling at me. I try to trust my gut instinct. Sometimes something is niggling but I can’t work out what it is, or I reach the deadline. I don’t always know, sometimes I’ve felt I needed to do something else and have had to leave a painting, and years later I think, oh yeah I’m so glad I left it.

What are you trying to do when you paint?

I’m not entirely sure. That’s a hard question. In some ways it’s quite simple, I want to make something that makes me really feel something, and if I can feel that then hopefully others might feel something from it too. It’s really difficult. That’s one of my intentions anyway. Sometimes that’s about connecting with a subject or idea and through painting somehow expressing something about that that kind of feels inexpressible or slippery or very intimate. That’s the ultimate, and I don’t know how that really happens. I’m paying very close and slow attention to something – one of our family dogs, or a small coin, or a sunrise or whatever – and certainly there’s all the technical stuff I’m doing, but I get into a tunnel with it and sometimes emerge and that magic has happened and sometimes not quite.

What’s the emotional journey of a painting, i.e. what sort of feelings do you have when you’re making something?

Quite intense feelings! Good ones like delight and excitement and feeling really in my body, and all the horrible ones too like anxiety, shame, embarrassment, doubt, despair. I’m up and down like a yo-yo, I have a day painting and I feel really quite happy with it, and then the next day anxiety creeps in about something and I start feeling very doubtful and embarrassed and wonder what the hell I’m doing. It depends on the project!

What do you see in the animals you paint?

All kinds of things I see in animals in general: goofiness, hunger, contentment, distress, pleasure, grief, empathy, joy, fear etc. But those are of course human projections or what I think I see. I wonder about the enormity of not knowing and how humans have fucked animals over and the intensity of feeling I have for the animals in my life and the strangeness and beauty and messiness of all that.

What are your ambitions?

I would like to paint all the creatures I’ve loved, I have made quite a few paintings of some of my animal pals but there are many more. I’d like to spend time thinking about them all. More murals, more work in the public realm I think. I’d like to try mosaics, I’m going to make one in our garden.

What would be your dream commission?

A giant ginger cat who wants an intricately painted and bejewelled house, inside and out, a sort of wild combination of a building/sculpture from Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden and a 14th century basilica with frescoes of animals and trees and people. I get to ride on the back of the cat and we go on evening wanders together.

Is there anything else you’d like to say?

If anyone reading this is interested in getting an animal portrait please feel free to email me at flobrooks14@gmail.com, and visit my website. You can also see my other work there.

PS. You don’t have to wait for a gallery show to see Flo’s work. He has a public piece in south London called Inner Bark Out if you’re in the area.