1.00m x 0.80m, Acrylic on canvas.
Artisite's resident reviewer, the eminent academic Christopher P. Bacon writes:
The eery follow up to 'The Devil Makes Work 4' (that work succeeding the critically aclaimed 'You Know What They Say...') , sees Brooks brilliantly combining the jumpy nervous energy of a faulty scalextric transformer thrown into a bathful of cats, with the solemnity and forboding sense of 'oh Christ, it's work in the morning' more often associated with Songs of Praise or Heartbeat.
The triv-enalia in the centre of the piece is a sim card symposium, that is, a 'No-well Head-mongs' Swap-Shop' of ephemera - those things which can so often determine (nay, overdetermine) the bad faith that pervades modern shlife- a lifebelt for the sinking, a chessboard for the challengers, a circus trapeze for the climbers to transcend the safety net and a big slice of cheese for the masochistic nightmare junkies and the cartoon mice. But amidst this seizure- salad of the soul we see a tangle of grasping upper limbs, independent of reason, mind, will and grace. Thus, false consciousness is now revealed and punched 'ap der brack-it' of the viewfinder. Nothing less than the emphatic empathetic anti-pathetic fallacy of the prosthetic aesthetic. It's the 3 legs of Man in a possible other caravan world meets Hunter S. Thompson's mushroom bagel being vomited over a rail at Blackpool pleasure beach.
Note the unflinching traditionalism of the use of paint and all stuff like that. Brooks created 'Idle Hands' after watching two sparrows on a lawn, whilst simultaneously (and quite deliberately) thinking about some bowler hats (an extrinsic feature which is obviously expressed within the work, but that is no less worthy of note for its two fingered hand waving).
Hands across the sea? Our scurvy said..." X EEH- UUHH!!" Snooze not in your Asda deck shoes. It would be easier to stand up in a hammock than it would be to mistake this feisty fist-fest for some sort of thumbs up (book early) fraternal finger flail. No, Brooks aims for the first art- ASBO, and these idle hands are the ones of hooded kids behind you on the bus, their cheap lighters set on full. 'Idle Hands' the work? It is quite simply a bum-fire of the sanities.