Weekly Interview #6 - Kimberly Brooks

Tell us about yourself and your work.

I am a painter who blends figuration and abstraction to convey certain ideas.  I keep a studio in Venice, California.

 

 

 

What got you started? What keeps you in?

I don't remember a time when I didn't identify with being an artist, but as a child I worked in pencil and pen.  I would make fantastical drawings and as a child I would make everyone sit for me so I could draw there portrait.  My journal was a sketch pad and it was filled with pictures and words in equal parts.  Then when I was eighteen, I started buying tubes of paint.  I just wanted to hold a tube of cadmium red or cerulean blue.  It took me a few years to actually use the paint.  It was like I was harboring a secret.  Once I started, I couldn't stop and I never will.

What/who inspires you? In what way?

I am inspired by people who are fearless. I am inspired by so many other things -- religious art, Indian Miniatures, great literature and fashion.  But in the end, it's always people.  

What is art for you? Examples of "real art"?

Real art is art that inspires me, moves me or tilts my view of the world in a different way.

 

 

 

The most powerful/your favourite medium: picture, words, sounds? Anything else?

 

For receiving, I have no favorite medium.  For giving, I favor painting and occasionally words.

 

 

 

Plans for future (of your work)?

 

I'm unspooling like a long thread from figuration and leaning towards abstraction.  I'm interested in that middle place where it's neither here nor there and both at once.

 

 

 

Anything you'd like to add? Maybe a song, a picture, hello to friends and family?

 

Thank you, Simon, for helping me share my work.  In the end, art is all about sharing.