Kimberly Brooks | I Have A King Who Does Not Speak

K I M B E R LY

B R O O K S

I Have a King Who Does Not Speak

K I M B E R LY

B R O O K S

I Have a King Who Does Not Speak

ROOSEVELT LIBRARY San Antonio, TX

ARTHOUSE 429 West Palm Beach, FL

When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

— Marcel Proust

ESSAY Bruce Helander

Sowing Seeds I have followed the development of Kimberly Brooks’ work for several years, and was pleased for the opportunity to introduce this ambitious new series of paintings which I recently curated at ArtHouse 429. In this catalog essay, I endeavor to offer the reader an opportunity to gain an intimate perspective on the evolution of Brooks’ singular style and the maturity of her thoughtful approach to picture-making. It is clear to me that the artist’s virtual rising star is more like a rare comet, coming right at us unexpectedly and we may not be fully prepared for, nor recognize at first, the complex chemistry.

Robert Rauschenberg once told me years ago during a conversation in his Captiva Island studio that virtually nothing can replace hard work (he was a workaholic and night owl) in securing the course that you sustain for a lifetime. I begin with this anecdote because from the evidence I see, diligent labor, taking chances, coupled with natural talent are the simple common denominators that shape Kimberly Brooks’ voice and mastery evident her latest exhibitions I Notice People Disappear and I Have a King Who Does Not Speak both of which are represented in this catalogue.

Brooks gathers and surrounds herself with inspirations from history, literature, contemporary life, costume, subliminal sexuality, and her travels to create a singular cohesive and surprising narrative visual

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statement. Formative ideas drift in the wind like cottonseeds spinning their blades in all directions until they claim a hardearned spot in which to grow and mature. I am, in fact, reminded of “The Sower” (1850), Jean-François Millet’s masterful painting on permanent display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It is not only a great metaphorical image, but also shares a distant relationship with some of Brooks’ figurative ingenuity and integrity. In this case, the propagating planter symbolizes the artist tossing out compositional ‘seed pods’ in all directions, which ultimately break new ground and spring to life on the canvas.

An inside studio view offers a distinct perspective on the complexities and personal triumphs of finding her way through trial and error.

Brooks takes calculated risks like a respectable laboratory technician - testing theories, mixing together liquids, investigating textures and tints, making notations, limiting the amount of time to lay down the brushwork so it stays loose — until a recognizable and consistent personality surfaces. Upon previewing these new images, Brooks has indeed found her way through a process of discovery for inventing a unique decipherable style of picture making that respectively takes cues from other artists and writers then takes it to a new level wholly her own.

These are particularly evident in her interiors such as “Parlour Room,” where a magical illumination of sunlight enters the room through the precise application of paint. A gowned figure gazes across a now empty space while a transparent second figure (is it a servant?) kneels in the foreground.

“Pink Salon,” a masterpiece, offers its complicated, voyeuristic view of a lady in white lace lying regally on a sofa below a sensational abstracted re-creation of a majestic painting within a painting that the Louvre Museum could inherit. The enchantment here is in the little details: an invisible glass flower jar with delicate brushstrokes evoking white lilies, a levitating candelabra, the large frame made with dashes of decorative hieroglyphics; and nearby little hints of another thin sliver of vertical light that casts a ghostly shadow. Brooks articulates the

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slash of exterior light with a single stroke, as economically as a writer would with a well-chosen word. I am reminded of Adolph Menzel, the versatile realist painter of historic paintings, landscapes and informal treatments of interior spaces with single figures (see: “Living-Room with the Artist’s Sister,” 1847), who utilizes feathery, nearly phantom like brushstrokes, which Brooks also has clearly mastered and folded comfortably into her oeuvre.

It takes an artist to know and artist. And I can assure the reader that creative maturity doesn’t evolve exclusively from some intuitive DNA gift, although that might help move things along, but through an unwavering structured daily schedule and it is in this crucible of diligence where the mind can lift into a new dimension. In Brooks’ case, this exclusive studio and workplace in Venice is an unofficial bibliotheca, where hundreds of ideas, potential titles, magazine clippings and pencil sketches go down in a paper playbook to be snipped, erased, rearranged and photocopied, developing into a cohesive collection of preliminary ‘blueprints’ whose segmented images will eventually find themselves transfixed to a nearby wall.

The collected images from contemporary artists range from Wilhelm Sasnal (his dealings with memory), Daniel Richter (imaginary and allegorical worlds), Herbert Brandl (the way he handles abstraction) and Elizabeth Peyton’s for her historical figures and to a degree her delicate, feminine hand).

The light-filled converted garage reveals a professional no-frills environment that immediately offers raw proof of a straightforward facility with only one purpose. Even small works in progress are still carefully and evenly spaced near the floorboards, which give the paintings respect and added emphasis. Larger pieces are hidden behind a canvas curtain, not to be disturbed until the artist decides to reveal them. The studio is orderly and minimal, so that any clutter does not compete with appreciating the images. A recent visit to Ross Bleckner’s Chelsea studio revealed a similar kind of charismatic integrity of keeping everything clean and neat, with all efforts to support works in progress with obvious parallels to Brooks’ efforts to make everything perfectly clear.

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A painting that caught my eye during a first visit proves to be pivotal in her work and also bears the name of the earlier show, “I Notice People Disappear” (collection of the Coral Springs Museum of Art).

Created before this series was begun, this image shows two figures against a translucent background and where the artist began to erase strategic pieces of an arrangement to produce a fading illusion for the first time. In her previous works, Mom’s Friends (2007), she focused on images of her childhood growing up in Mill Valley, the facial features are visible and nostalgic. In Thread (2011) her work becomes noticeably more abstract and deconstructs the portraiture where faces and folds are not so clearly rendered. In the I Have a King Who Does Not Speak exhibition(s), the faces are not just featureless but the bodies often disappear altogether leaving the shell of costume as if reanimating a mannequin against an ethereal blackened background.

Clearly inspired by others who uncovered a pathway to invention and singularity, Brooks’ muses are radically varied, including legendary pioneers like Picasso points to African masks; Modigliani to ToulouseLautrec; Gauguin to Pissarro; John Currin to Courbet; and, if I might add myself, Helander to Joseph Cornell and Kurt Schwitters’ collages.

It helps also to know that before studying painting at UCLA and the Otis School of Art and Design, Brooks received her B.A. in English Literature from UC Berkeley where she had the opportunity to study and absorb all three volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

His stream of consciousness style and introduction of involuntary memory, not just of his own life, but those of other characters, left a lasting impression. To wit, Marcel Proust bites into a madeleine at his grandmother’s house and a moment from his early childhood comes flooding toward him, and then the record needle skips to a different song, and he spends the rest of the volume on another man’s life, that of M.Charles Swan, an older family friend of his father. The idea, referenced in the featured quote, that memory has a liquidity to it; that an image, like a madeleine, can flood the mind not just of one’s own past but from another’s and from another time, is key to understanding the inspiration behind the works in both I Notice People Disappear and I Have a King Who Does Not Speak.

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But while an artist can and should arm herself with academic references and stimulating motivations and an inquisitive mind, for a serious, well-educated painter, all these disparate elements need to come together at once and straight through the very tip of an artist’s brush proscribed by memory and incident, because when the sable hits the table she’s on her own.

In these fascinating exhibitions, she takes control and captures a world of guilty pictorial pleasures, from opulent interiors and hazy landscapes in a new way. In doing so, she lays down an eccentrically handsome collection of quasi-surrealist strokes inducing the sensation of reliving a vintage portrait snapped from another time, like a recollection of sitting next to a dapper dinner guest at a black tie event and wondering about his ancestry. In this stimulating anthology of works, accented with Indian spice, Payne’s gray, burnt sienna, rouge orange, and Prussian blue, Kimberly Brooks has proved that she has the ability to fearlessly continue to create a de facto framed storyboard that turns into a wonderful and handsomely genuine ‘disappearing act’ of picture-making that is filled with mystery and antiquity.

Bruce Helander West Palm Beach

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Maiden / Landscape 12 x 15 in., Oil on Linen 7

Castle Grounds 36 x 48 in., Oil on Linen 11

Unknown Ancestor 32 x 40 in., Oil on Linen 13

Fever Dream 40 x 30 in., Oil on Linen 14

Mahogany Lament 40 x 30 in., Oil on Linen 15

Parlour Room 36 x 48 in., Oil on Linen 21

Pink Salon 36 x 48 in., Oil on Linen 23

I Was There and It Was Divine 36 x 48 in., Oil on Linen 29

Blue Drawing Room 32 x 40 in., Oil on Linen 31

Portrait of Arjun 20 x 16 in., Oil on Linen 32

Portrait of Layla 20 x 16 in., Oil on Linen 33

Pink Assembly 20 x 24 in., Oil on Linen 35

High Tea 60 x 48 in., Oil on Linen 38

I Remember Paris 36 x 36 in., Oil on Linen 42

Epiphany 24 x 18 in., Oil on Linen 43

The Banquet, Study 20 x 16 in., Oil on Linen 2013 Opposite The Banquet 60 x 48 in., Oil on Linen 2013 45

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The Myth of What Happened by the Tree and the River 36 x 36 in., Oil on Linen 46

The Memory of the Banquet 20 x 20 in., Oil on Linen 47

The Banquet 60 x 48 in., Oil on Linen 48

Raja Summit 24 x 36 in., Oil on Linen 51

Harem 24 x 30 in., Oil on Linen 53

Family Tree 24 x 18 in., Oil on Linen 54

WORKS 2010-2012

The Pretending 20 x 16 in., Oil on Linen 56

I Notice People Disappear 24 x 18 in., Oil on Linen 57

The Passage 40 x 30 in., Oil on Linen 58

The Victorian 50 x 30 in., Oil on Linen 59

The Showroom 16 x 12 in., Oil on Linen 60

The Collector 16 x 12 in., Oil on Linen 61

Punk History 44 x 36 in., Oil on Linen 63

Soho House 44 x 36 in., Oil on Linen 64

Elizabeth Stewart 30 x 24 in., Oil on Linen 65

Amy Fine Collins 9 x 12 in., Oil on Linen 67

Page 7 Maiden / Landscape 12 x 15 in., Oil on Linen 2013

Page 31 Blue Drawing Room 32 x 40 in., Oil on Linen 2014

Page 11 Castle Grounds 36 x 48 in., Oil on Linen 2013 Private Collection

Page 32 Portrait of Arjun 20 x 16 in., Oil on Linen 2014 Private Collection

Page 13 Unknown Ancestor 32 x 40 in., Oil on Linen 2014

Page 33 Portrait of Layla 20 x 16 in., Oil on Linen 2014 Private Collection

Page 14 Fever Dream 40 x 30 in., Oil on Linen 2013 Page 15 Mahogany Lament 40 x 30 in., Oil on Linen 2013 Private Collection Page 21 Parlour Room 36 x 48 in., Oil on Linen 2013 Page 23 Pink Salon 36 x 48 in., Oil on Linen 2013 Page 29 I Was There and It Was Divine 36 x 48 in., Oil on Linen 2014

Page 35 Pink Assembly 20 x 24 in., Oil on Linen 2013 Private Collection Page 39 High Tea 60 x 48 in., Oil on Linen 2014 Page 42 I Remember Paris 36 x 36 in., Oil on Linen 2014 Page 43 Epiphany 24 x 18 in., Oil on Linen 2014 Page 46 The Myth of What Happened by the Tree and River 36 x 36 in., Oil on Linen 2013

Page 47 The Memory of the Banquet 20 x 20 in., Oil on Linen 2013 Page 49 The Banquet 60 x 48 in., Oil on Linen 2013 Private Collection

Page 59 The Victorian 50 x 30 in., Oil on Linen 2011 Private Collection Page 60 The Showroom 16 x 12 in., Oil on Linen 2011

Page 51 Raja Summit 24 x 36 in., Oil on Linen 2014

Page 61 The Collector 16 x 12 in., Oil on Linen 2011

Page 53 Harem 24 x 30 in., Oil on Linen 2013 Private Collection

Page 63 Punk History 44 x 36 in., Oil on Linen 2011 Private Collection

Page 54 Family Tree 24 x 18 in., Oil on Linen 2013

Page 64 Soho House 44 x 36 in., Oil on Linen 2011 Private Collection

Page 56 The Pretending 20 x 16 in., Oil on Linen 2012 Page 57 I Notice People Disappear 24 x 18 in., Oil on Linen 2012 Collection of the Coral Springs Museum of Art Page 58 The Passage 40 x 30 in., Oil on Linen 2013 Private Collection

Page 65 Elizabeth Stewart 30 x 24 in., Oil on Linen 2010 Private Collection Page 67 Amy Fine Collins 9 x 12 in., Oil on Linen 2011 Private Collection

American Painter Kimberly Brooks blends figuration and abstraction to explore a variety of subjects dealing with memory, history and identity. Born in New York City and raised in Northern California, Brooks received her B.A. in Literature from UC Berkeley, and studied painting at the Otis School of Art and Design and UCLA. Solo shows in the United States include The Whole Story 2006, Momâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Friends 2007, Technicolor Summer 2008, The Stylist Project 2010, Thread 2011 (Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles) and I Notice People Disappear 2014 at ArtHouse 429, in West Palm Beach. This series, I Have a King Who Does Not Speak, is an extension of the Disappear series, and is curated by Alice Foultz at the Roosevelt Library in San Antonio. This catalogue represents works from both exhibitions. Group exhibitions include White Box Contemporary, San Diego, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, LA><ART and the City Museum of New York. Brooksâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; paintings have been showcased in numerous juried exhibitions with curators including Chris Burden, Mira Schor and Museum curators from the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Brooks lives in Los Angeles and works out of her studio in Venice, California.

KIMBERLY BROOKS: I Have a King Who Does Not Speak Nov 20, 2014 - Jan 14, 2015 Roosevelt Library Curator, Alice Carrington Foultz Roosevelt Library San Antonio, TX KIMBERLY BROOKS: I Notice People Disappear Feb 6 - March 6, 2014 Curator, Bruce Helander ARTHOUSE 429 West Palm Beach, FL Publisher: Everbook Press Design: Judy Toretti Photography: Susan Einstein, Static Media Printing: Art Works, Fine Art Publishing First Edition, November 2014 Printed and Bound in California All Images Š KIMBERLY BROOKS All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be duplicated or transmitted in any form without prior written consent from the artist.

Displaying such material without prior permission is a violation of international copyright laws.

ISBN-10:0988283166 Roosevelt Library 311 Roosevelt Avenue San Antonio, TX 78210 www.kimberlybrooks.com