POWER of the PORTRAIT 2007 Second Place Award Winner Adam Brooks
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SECOND Place
Award Winner:
Adam Brooks / Canada I play with the connotations of portraiture. Cherished family members and pets appear alongside characters, and celebrities I've only met in dreams. Most important to me is that the work have a painterly quality: that each stroke is a colour, shape, gesture and subject all at once. In this way, the qualities of the paint and the colour can infuse the subject matter with a beauty that it was previously lacking. Elevating the artistic beauty of pop images and forensic photography, alongside highly personal snapshots, lets viewers reconsider the imagery and possibly meditate on their own isolation and on the beauty and sadness of living in a compartmentalized society. other works by Adam Brooks can be viewed at:  |
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GALLERY COMMENT:: Adam Brooks paints portraits of family, friends and pop stars with a sure hand and an audacious sense of color. He invents unexpected, unpredictable colors and places them next to each other, like the ghastly greens in the winning painting that is tempered with the soft pink pastels and the siena of the shadowing. Somehow it all works and the result is striking and at times disconcerting. His technique is less a blending and scumbling than a laying down of sections of unified colors that react with each other, allowing the viewer to do the mixing. The rather large scale of the paintings add to the power. |