“Good grief”: a phrase of exasperation. (Good grief. How could something like this happen?) Two words that, after a very trying, challenging 2016, seem to resonate more than ever. Together they are an expression of disbelief or exhaustion or maybe even a simple description. (Good grief. Can grief ever be good?)
“Good Grief” is also the title of Brooke Pickett’s newest body of paintings, currently on view at The Front: four bold, large-scale works that reveal more the longer the viewer spends with them. Colors and forms are fractured and abstracted, flattened onto a single plane with thick, textured brushstrokes, recalling the work of the Abstract Expressionists. On a quiet visit to the gallery, Pickett’s seven-foot-tall canvases towered over the space in a punchy palette of coral and cobalt, watermelon and kelly green.
In Once More, With Feeling, 2016, two dark ovals hover like omniscient eyes at the top of the canvas above strokes of pastoral greens and blues. After a longer look, they take on a figurative quality and become the heads of two bodies engaged in a dance or dramatic performance. Brushwork becomes limbs entwined. (Good grief. Once more, with feeling.) I kept returning to this work. Sometimes, when we experience shattering loss or defeat, we reach a level of fatigue that dictates how we must grieve, how we can respond and express ourselves. (Good grief. Let’s get it right this time.) And the performance continues.
It’s hard not to imagine the starting point or inspiration for some of Pickett’s paintings. The title work has bold blues in a shape that recalls an empty swimming pool. It should be calming, but the still waters end up feeling a little uneasy and lonely. (Good grief. Where is everyone?) Many of Pickett’s paintings do begin with real-world objects; however, they are more than a mystery in abstraction, waiting to be decoded. Dwarfed by their size, I found myself looking inward for answers and asking why we choose to experience art in times of stress or uncertainty. What makes grief good? As we experience it, it feels like the answer to that is “nothing.” (Good grief. Who can really know?)
-Taylor Murrow
Oil on canvas, 7x5ft 2016
Oil on canvas, 7x5ft 2016
Oil on canvas, 7x5ft 2016
Farm & Implement is a series of paintings that explore a mix of off-the-grid survival living, the performance of coziness, shelter, and decor. While making these paintings I was simultaneously studying "No Grid Survival Projects" and "The American Woman's Home."
Oil on canvas, 7x5ft 2019
Oil on canvas, 7x5ft 2019
Oil on canvas, 7x5ft 2019
Words like anti-epoch, monumental, everyday, and empathetic are often used to describe Pickett’ s work and while these qualities remain consistent in her practice, How to Cook a Wolf, marks a departure. If Pickett’ s previous solo exhibition illustrated proficiency and unique visual language in painting, Pickett’ s new work reveals the semiotics of her practice. This exhibition is titled from a cookbook published by M.F.K. Fisher in 1942 during WWII to address wartime food shortages. Described as ‘ a wealth of practical and delicious ways to keep the wolf from the door,’ this title, when paired with large-scale abstract works, poses a poignant question to the viewer about both creative and personal livelihood. In paintings like How to Distribute Your Virtue, How to Stay Alive, and Paint Will Not Cover a Multitude of Sins, Pickett’ s voice appears more pronounced, directive, comical, and personal. The female perspective is privileged in Pickett’ s exploration of domestic and moral themes, reflected in the juxtaposition of forms that take the shape of household cleaners, lighting apparatuses, and coat hangers. The compositions are less dream-like and ambiguous, and the simplified formal relationships in the work lay in space, creating distinct moments that further separation and recognition of forms which may or may not be sawhorses, brooms, stairs, piano keys and bottles. This “may” or “may not” beingness is a question in the form of Pickett’ s arrangements and abstractions, yet things are very much distinctly what they are in this body of work. The mystification of semblance is a strategy that Pickett has executed successfully throughout her practice, but Pickett’ s focus is currently directed to emphasizing the presence of each formal element. The title of the exhibition (along with several of individual work titles) implies recipe, action, and mourning simultaneously. Pickett seems to be asking herself and the viewer at what cost and within what means do we follow through or divert from our commitments to people, careers, and individual needs.
-Angela Berry
Oil on canvas, 5x7ft 2015
Oil on canvas, 7x5ft 2015
Oil on canvas, 7x5ft, 2015
Oil on canvas, 7x5ft 2015
Oil on canvas, 7x5ft 2015
Oil on canvas, 7x5ft 2015
Oil on canvas, 5x7ft 2015
Brooke Pickett's paintings are big — as large as 10 feet tall — yet for all that, they are not heroic or any other one thing. They have all sorts of things happening at once. Like a dream journey through a familiar landscape where ordinary shapes and forms take on a strange hallucinatory life of their own, they are simultaneously intriguing and unsettling. Painted in big, gloopy swatches of saturated pomegranate, avocado, blueberry, goldenrod and rust, objects that are typically homey — things that may have started out as table lamps, stools, bits of rubbish or maybe ladders — mutate into strange visual tone poems taut with suspense and an incipient sense of wonder. In this Contemporary Arts Center expo, we see this in Sorrow Floats, where a glowing lampshade becomes a beacon in a turbid sea of subconscious intrigue. Part of it has to do with those rich, psychically fraught colors applied in loose brush strokes that can seem very loose compared to Robert Gordy's tightly delineated canvases upstairs at the CAC. But Pickett's compositions are otherwise somewhat tight once you get used to the surprising exuberance of pigments that seem to revel in their own woozy plasticity. In Mississippi Goddam (pictured), green and brown patches evoke the leafy farms and forests of the South, but vertical bars and ruptured reds suggest trouble, maybe even oppression, lurking beneath the lush arboreal facade. Closing in Against the Weather is more claustrophobic, a wavy, netlike mesh of pale, pulsating blobs that evoke the work of Philip Guston, as noted in Kathy Rodriguez's long, thoughtful review on NolaDefender.com. But, ultimately, I think of the "center cannot hold" in the title, a line popularized in William Butler Yeats' poem The Second Coming, but later associated with Joan Didion, whose writing was always really about her thought processes, which she somehow made fascinating regardless of her subject. So too are Pickett's paintings fraught with their own inner processes, and it is to her credit that they inspire empathy with their silent visual soliloquies.
— D. Eric Bookhardt
Oil on canvas, 6x4ft 2014
Oil on canvas, 6x4ft 2014
Oil on canvas, 6x4ft 2014
Oil on canvas, 6x4ft 2014
Oil on canvas, 6x4ft 2014
Oil on canvas, 3x5ft 2014