Suzanne Brooker

My passion for the visual world and the pursuit of making images began at any early age and has motivated my work as an artist. How images evoke memory, create metaphor, capture a relatedness between viewer and artist, awaken an aesthetic response has been an ongoing investigation. I work primarily from observation, often using my own photographs, as well as newspaper images and works of other artists, historical and contemporary, as source material. A series of paintings usually evolves from a metaphoric theme, a pictorial problem of light and space or a dialogue created between abstraction (flat surface) and representation (illusion of form). Drawing plays an important part in my creative process, whether to sharpen my perceptions or to discover the calligraphic mark underlying a gesture. The paintbrush becomes a way to draw-in-paint, dancing over the surface, that combines intensive layering of transparent paint with areas of thicker, more gesturally applied paint. One of my goals as an artist is to combine Old Master approaches to paint palettes and techniques combined with modern notions of the paint surface. This has lead me to explore a rich variety of paint layers involving the transparency of paint over fields of toned grounds in contrast to more direct, gestural “traces” left by a painted stroke. The calligraphy of the brush mark, whether scumbled, dabbed, blended or loosely drawn through the paint becomes the means for developing a rich surface. Overall my aim is to create a sense of a glow of light emanating from within the figure rather than a reflection from the surface of the skin. The human dilemma expressed through anatomical gesture would be the simplest way to describe my current work. It was during my graduate studies in figurative painting that I became deeply involved in the beautiful complexity of rendering the human body. I drew bones, painted from cadavers, and studied the art of the Renaissance in order to find that moment of the “telling” gesture that reveals humanity through the human form. How to convey the unique qualities of a person set within the context of the universal human drama, the expression of their individuality, is more important to me in a portrait painting, then who they are as a social identity.