Jay Brady - So I See

Jay Brady

I have been drawing all my life. Some influences are: playing in the woods; playing on a construction site; imitating people, animals, objects; watching water pool & flow; watching and listening to branches & leaves in the wind; watching the light change; pretending in the midst of the real world; singing; dancing; Halloween; the work of Goya, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Lautrec, van Gogh, Cezanne, Degas, Manet, Bach, Dvořák, Armstrong, Gershwin, Ellington, Rota, Goodman, Bechet, Astaire, Satie; the work in caves such as Altamira & Lascaux; Chinese brush painting; and calligraphers such as Zhang Xu. I draw spontaneously, absorbing the subject matter, impersonating it inwardly, feeling its inflection and structure—as with music—and then enacting it using marks. As soon as I begin, I have two more tools: accident and improvisation. Drawing is such an absorbing activity—responsive, flexible, investigatory, full of ideas. The intense combination of observation and improvisation creates something like a spell. It's a marvelous condition.