John Brack Quotes on Art

John Brack was a famous Australian painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He is best known for his depictions of everyday life in Australia, especially as it was in the fifties and sixties. Famous John Brack paintings include “The Car”, “Collins St., 5 pm”, “Nude with Two Chairs”, “The Telephone Box”, “Portrait of Fred Williams”, “Barry Humphries in the Character of Mrs Everage”, “Latin American Grand Final”, “The Old Time”, “The New House”, and “The Bar”.

Mini biography: Born Cecil John Brack on the 10th of May, 1920 in South Melbourne, Australia. His mother was Florence Myrtle, née Phillips and his father Albert Augustus Williams was an electrical engineer. Brack married Helen, née Maudsley in 1948 and they had four children together: Clara, Vicki, Freda, and Charlotte. The artist died on the 11th of February, 1999 in Hawthorn East, Melbourne, Australia at the age of 78.

List of Famous John Brack Art Quotes

I’m always dubious about the remarks painters make about their own work, because what we so often say is rather what we would like to have done than what we’ve really done. John Brack

I am not interested in how she looks sitting in the studio, but in how she looks at all times, in all lights, what she looked like before and what she is going to look like, what she thinks, hopes, believes and dreams. John Brack

I always paint without a model, because being a conceptual painter, being a painter whose interest is in ideas, the model gets in the road, prevents me from meditating about it in such a way that I’m absorbed by hosts of visual details instead of by the idea. John Brack

It’s not enough to just paint pictures of ideas; at the same time we must put it into a visual form which is as complete as any abstract visual form. And here, there’s always a conflict between the demands of the idea and the demands of the form. John Brack

Fred brought us a new vision of Australia’s landscape at least as valid and impressive as any of the two or three major illuminations which went before it. He changed the way we see our country: an achievement which will live long after all of us are gone. John Brack

What I’m interested in in painting is people, of course, principally, how they live, how they behave, how they get the faces they deserve, how they can bear to put up with a life which seems so curiously tragic. John Brack

Walking in a suburban street one day the car passed me and, as it did so, the occupants looked out. This seemed to compose itself as picture instantly, which I have found to be rare. (talking about his popular ‘The Car’ painting) John Brack

I look at one of my paintings, and think: if somebody wants to pay $250,000 to $300,000 for that, there must be something terribly wrong with it. It makes me feel uneasy.. society is off balance. John Brack

What a shock – we were ravaged and charmed at once on that first contact with Bernard Buffet’s universe! Desolate objects.. bathed in an atmosphere of anguish, as angular and elongated as the painter with his stick-insect body, with a triangular mask, bristly hair, perched on a spindly stool or lying on a camp bed, with a skinned rabbit or two dried fish for company. The distress in these monochromatic compositions, the emptiness which translates all that the heart lacks, the elongation of verticals and horizontals, the nervousness of evil lines of force, lightly scratching the thin paint, all proclaim a painter fit to resume like Kafka, Kierkegaard, Sartre, the insecurity and deprivations of his childhood. John Brack

I know that to be interested in people’s behavior for a painter is most impure. It’s called literary, and in our day nothing could be a greater sin than to be a literary painter; but now I’m old enough to feel that it’s a waste of time to apologize for not painting in some other way, and the fact is that I’m still always fascinated by people and their behavior. John Brack

John Brack Self Portrait Painting

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Related or similar popular artists and celebrities include: Brett Whiteley, Bernard Buffet, Fred Williams and other Famous Australian Painters.