Letters, according to the poet Emily Dickinson, are “a joy of Earth –/ It is denied the Gods–.” They keenly express our very human need for connection, embracing distance as a form to express our preternatural need for longing. With that incentive, I write letters. Some of my compositional choices, such as dashes and how I dot my t’s and exchange cursive letters for print letters, come from a long engagement with Dickinson’s own style of composing her letters and poems on the page. Other influences that I picked up when I was younger were from the excellent collection of Chinese and Japanese scrolls at the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City. I was especially drawn to the running scripts, or semi-cursive scripts, which are very difficult to read due to the expressive hand, but carry a special pathos because of this.
For my show Trout Fishing in America at Heidi in London, I chose to display a hand written letter interspersed with my paintings. I prefer to work instinctually, so this decision was made first without a specific agenda, but upon reflection, I have the thought that part of this gesture was made to utilize the act of reading in order to slow our viewing down. I am very much a painter and truly enjoy looking at paintings. In our current crisis of attention at the moment (myself included), I long to spend more time–long amounts of time–looking at a painting, appreciating its capacity for detail and storytelling. One of painting’s gifts is that it is capable of producing a space for deep thought. This gift–thought, or the act of thinking–probably or most certainly, is also denied the Gods.
The wind picked up earlier than usual today. At times I could characterize it as relentless – the wind, but more often than not our mornings are a calm break. Even as a girl growing up in Oklahoma, the wind would stir deep, restless feelings in me. In my chest – something close to a gnawing pain or close to anxiety, but not quite arriving there. Yet, it is enough to breed a rage that longs to destroy. No amount of water soothes its distress or can dowse it with any relief. And it’s something I can’t let go of. Like a longing. The wind is a longing.
I regret not saying this to you sooner, but perhaps I didn’t think the information was necessary to divulge until now… now that I’m nearing the completion of this group of paintings.. the truth is starting to surface. It felt rather obtuse and out of touch to be bringing Richard Brautigan up right now. I don’t know, maybe I just have all of these doubts right now. It has been a struggle lately to make work and function in a regular way with my day to day. But then I started to reread him and I felt like something that I couldn’t make sense of in my life, some really deep ache that’s not so intense, but steady and annoying, was suddenly relieved. He made me laugh.
When I was 17 and 18 I had a lover who was 9 years older than me. He would come to Oklahoma to play music with people, but he was British and lived most of the year editing wedding videos in London. He introduced me to a lot of books, music and movies that I still love today. Do you see where I am taking this? I won’t go into every detail. Yes, he gave me my first copy of a book by Brautigan. What was the first one I read? I’m not sure. I think it was The Hawkline Monster. To be honest my favorite back then was In Watermelon Sugar. Anything with a love story.
Around the time I made my first trip to visit him in London, I also went to Paris for the first time. Did I meet the work of Balthus then and there too? You have to guess because I don’t feel like I should spill all of my secrets right now. I had a few lovers at the time. To be completely honest, I was rather wild or you could call me free spirited. Was it the Oklahoma wind in my heart? It was certainly a beautifully destructive time.
I’ve been rather possessed by this particular work “La Victime” by Balthus since those teenage years; but it wasn’t until my early thirties that I made my first attempts to wrestle with it directly in my work. That first work “La Froggy Victime” was a diptych painted in ink on canvas at a large scale. It would be another five years before I exchanged the fleshed body with a skeletal form.
My first impression of seeing La Victime was that it was a horrifying painting and that the paint was very ugly. I mean here that the physicality of the paint had a sort of nauseating quality to it. I try to really remind myself of this first impression sometimes because my later impressions were very much subjected to my idolization of Balthus and so clouded as well by a broken heart, that broken heart somehow compartmentalized and transferred into this artwork. Somewhere between these memories, as reliable as memory can be, is my own little painting.
Much of my efforts for the past several years have been in service of landscape, both the idea of it as a subject in painting and expanding our understanding of it. As well I’ve tried to emphasize the importance of story, storytelling and how special it is to humanity. How painting functions within these poles of thought – the real question of how – is at the core of my efforts. I say all of this but I’m not sure it’s what really matters.What really matters in all of this is that we keep trying to find a new language for our understanding of love. LOVE! I say. Love as an active, as an action. Every effort is meant to be one made as a love action.
Much of what I’ve read regarding La Victime is written by Jean Clair. And in this regard there is scant material about this particular painting. Pierre Jean Jouve wrote a fictional book based on the subject of the painting and the rape of a young girl, but this hasn’t been translated into english. In Jean Clair’s book, he mostly relates La Victime to still life paintings, particularly those painted by Balthus around the same year as La Victime. He makes mention that the position of the figure is a mirrored image of Poussin’s Narcissus. My thoughts here run a bit curious, since there isn’t a more in depth review of the relationship between the Poussin work and Balthus’s. I keep wondering why Clair doesn’t relate La Victime as well toward landscape. Of course I don’t deny the strange – enigmatic – relationship the work has with still life. But what makes it more total I believe is the merging of still life with landscape through the repetition and reference to Poussin. In doing this, I believe we could ground a more formal argument in La Victime as a non-traditional vanitas. In this sense, the enigma of the work relies on benefitting from portraying the subjects of impermanence, violence, desire, youth and fragility all on rather unconventional terms.
So when considering my own work, alongside these transferences, I would like to consider it, with the Trout Fishing in America paintings, as a bringing together of these parts:
OR
The question marks for me represent thoughts and questions that are unanswered observations of the paintings I’m making. Such as the feeling of the sheets on the beds, how I relate them to the feeling of a trout in my hands or water through my fingers. Or the relationship of the elongated images to my desire to belong. How landscape plays a role in belonging. How vanity plays a role in destruction. What is always inevitable? I have more questions but I think that I’ll leave it open for now.
Gosh! I miss you both so much. I want to laugh and play and eat and drink and smoke lots of cigarettes together until late into the night.
All my love,
Brook
Brook Hsu: Trout Fishing in America continues at Heidi, London, until 7 November 2026.
