Jane BROOKESPrevious Artist Next Artist

My most recent paintings have been inspired by specific locations around me, places I see every day but had forgotten to stop and appreciate or simply taken for granted. The pictures are, essentially, self portraits, documentations of what and how I think and see. They allow me to define myself in relation to the world around me.

Looking back a few years, I have noticed a gradual change in my work from minimalist, almost abstract landscapes to images with greater elements of reality in them. By using digital photography more often than memory, I can more accurately depict a specific place. Creative elements, however, remain unchanged. As the painting progresses alterations are made: man-made objects are edited, colours evolve, my mood is adopted and the painting becomes more fictive.

Although my paintings are inspired by real places, they serve as metaphors for the phenomenon of recollection, stimulating the process of memory itself. They are signifiers, constructions of key essentials of a landscape remembered, imagined and organized to form a metaphoric short story, in a sense, a diary.

Through the visual language of painting, I attempt to express an outpouring of my memories, emotions and desires. The paintings become narratives about who I am and my constant journey of self discovery. The multiple layers of tinted glazes I use in each painting become, in effect, like the pages of a short story; setting the mood and appealing to the viewer’s senses. The theme of each story is consistent: each painting contains a destination, a path or a place beyond the horizon and the viewer is invited to penetrate the layers of paint to search for his or her own connection to the story within.

My paintings are comprised of dozens of thin layers of pigment painted over a primary base of deep red. When overlapped, these layers provide a sense of peering into depths of colour, much like layering many pieces of coloured cellophane. Because of this technique, I paint on wood as it provides a smooth, mirror like surface that not only protects the fragile paint it allows me the freedom to sand away layers to allow colours from below to re-surface.

Often, my paintings will change in appearance depending on the light conditions in which they are displayed. When lit by natural light, they will take on the mood of the day as it progresses from morning to night. The more light shone on the painting, the more the deepers layers of colour will refract providing deeper, more intense tones.

Artificial Reality

Although my paintings are inspired by real places, they are more evocative than specific. They are based on recollections of specific locales, ideas about certain times. They are hidden places revealed by memory and imagination.

I want my images to be real enough to remind us where we are in relation to nature, but they must also be seen as paintings, creative artifacts. My images contain no representations of man made, hand made objects nor do they bear any reference to man’s interference with land. Yet, they are painted by hand, on structures taken from nature and built by hand.

My images are primarily about the strength of nature which is beginning to show the signs of human interference. They often portray turbulent weather or elements created by natural environmental effects: wide skies stretching over distant hills moments after a storm has broken and sun filters through broken clouds.

There is a force found in the light that I want the viewer to experience. The effect colour has on the onlooker is central to my painting. I want to trigger their emotions and connect them to the sky and the land.

There is a strong sensitivity to the horizon in my work, perhaps because I have spent my life living on Vancouver’s hillsides, looking out at the line that divides Howe Sound from the strips of land and sky above it.

Regardless of where my glance is cast, my eyes seek the horizon yet my imagination, my dreams seek what may be found beyond it.

I am an artist that craves simplicity, beauty and, above all the ability of visual expression to move me.

Beauty arouses joy while the sublime arouses awe and admiration. My landscapes tend to speak for the evocative nature that was captured by the 19th century European Romantic painters, the artist’s of the Hudson River School and the simplified colour-field compositions of Mark Rothko.

I use rich colours to extract seductive moods and the ceaseless motion of time. They seize the shifting obscurities of a passing moment, a day or a season when light conditions are changing: the haziness of a summer day, the half light of warm dusk or the instant before rain falls. Each image captures the infinite captures the all important element of mood itself – light.

My Landscapes are more that a literal depiction of Nature, they are therapeutic outpourings of memories and emotions. They are narratives about who I am and my constant journey of self discovery.

Biography

Jan. 1954 Born Vancouver, B.C.
May 2000 Graduated Emily Carr Institute of Art And Design, Vancouver, B.C.
Diploma Visual Arts
Bachelor Fine Art

Group Exhibitions:

May 2000 ECIAD Graduation Show
July 2000 Five ECIAD Grads Diane Farris Gallery, Vancouver
October 2000 Diane Farris Gallery
February 2000 The Land Diane Farris Gallery
May 2001 Diane Farris Gallery
October 2002 Toronto International Art Fair
December 2002 Buschlen Mowatt Gallery, Vancouver, B.C.
November 2003 Toronto International Art Fair
May 2004 Buschlen Mowatt Gallery
October 2004 Toronto International Art Fair
May 2005 Wallace Galleries Ltd, Calgary

Solo Exhibition:

April 2002 Big Sky Diane Farris Gallery
January 2004 Earth Air Water Buschlen Mowatt Gallery
February 2005 Jane Brookes Buschlen Mowatt Gallery, Vancouver
April 2005 Illusions of Reality, with Mandy BoursicotWallace Walleries Ltd. Calgary, AB

Publications: