Transcript

Trigger: Nancy Brooks Brody

 Hi I’m Nancy Brooks Brody. I often go by Brody.

The paintings that I’m showing at the New Museum are a series that I began in 2009 and worked on it through 2013. I ended up calling this series Glory Holes because they are based on a phenomenon in nature called glories which are round rainbows. The paintings that have a black ground are 21 inches, the paintings that have a white ground are 28 inches, and the gray are 35 and that’s so that they can all be divided by 7, which are the 7 colors of the rainbow. There is mixed into the paint of each painting whether it was the white paint, the gray paint, or the black paint is a very specific measure of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet—Roy G Biv. In these, there is violet at the center and it emanates out to red. It’s a very small amount of paint that is mixed into the oil. One would think these are simply white on gray or black on white but there’s actually color in that black and color in that white. If you stand and look at these paintings from a particular distance or side to side there’s kind of a sweet spot where you might actually see these colors.

Often telling too much about the measure and the math involved in making these paintings is less important for the viewer to know. I don’t want the viewer to get stuck trying to find the color or look for the mitten in the picture, the color is there, it’s there in certain increments and I believe or hope that is something one will feel when one is looking at them. I think ideally one perceives the color and senses the color without it necessarily leaping out at you. And I think if you take time with these paintings and you allow your gaze to relax and the ego to recede some you might actually experience the color and the paintings in a way that is different if it was just white on black or gray on white.