Brooks + Brooks: Sum of the Parts

Sonja Brooks & Ann Brooks

Sonja Brooks
Artist Statement:  I create multi-layered, richly textured, mixed media collages that celebrate people, events, and social, cultural and environmental themes. Sometimes, however, I just have fun playing with color and texture, and placing images cut from old children’s books into imagined scenes.
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A paper collage is usually the starting point for my work. To that I add traditional artist materials and items from my stash of accumulated papers and art projects, used postage stamps, vintage ephemera, fabric scraps, and a whole assortment of found objects. These materials are my artistic inspiration. Against this background, it’s only natural that mixed media and collage are the art formats I prefer. They’re great for including just about any material, technique or design. 

About the Artist:  Sonja Brooks is an exhibiting and teaching artist, as well as co-founder and Director of Sisohpromatem Art Foundation Inc. (SAF, Inc.), a non-profit established in Lexington, Kentucky in 2003. In these roles she encourages children and adults to explore the fun of art making and its power to nourish growth and change. As Director of SAF, Inc. Sonja organizes engaging arts programming to help children develop into independent, creative and responsible members of the community.  

Sonja creates mixed media art and has exhibited her work, for over 30 years, in competitive juried art shows in Kentucky, Ohio and Maryland. She has a passion for paper collage, the basis of most of her artwork. Occasionally, for a change of pace, she creates small fabric works, jewelry, altered books and assemblages. Sonja maintains a private studio and gallery space in downtown Lexington.

Sonja grew up in Washington, D.C., where she graduated with a BA from Howard University and an MA from Catholic University. She lived and worked in the Baltimore/Washington area until retirement in 1999. At that time, she moved to Lexington, Kentucky, the ancestral home of her husband, Kenneth H. Brooks, to help operate the Heritage Art Center, which they co-founded as an art center dedicated to social change.

Ann Brooks
Artist Statement:  Circle Series consists of 30, 12” X 12” acrylic collages, painted on canvas paper and mounted onto wood panels. I started these pieces about nine months ago expressly for the Brooks＋ Brooks: Sum of the Parts show. My intention was to experiment with the process I was currently working with but on a smaller scale and with a lot of repetition.  I decided to add the circle on each panel and isolate the lines within that focal point as a way to unify the individual pieces into one thought. 

I enjoy working within the self inflicted confines of a set process. Adhering to the rules of the process helps keep me focused and moving forward by limiting my aesthetic choices, it's freeing for me. Having 10, 20, then 30 pieces to work on at one time kept me from focusing too long on one piece and gave me 30 chances to arrive at a look and feel that I found to be “right”. Over time I started to solve some of the assembly and materials problems that initially slowed me down and settled into a machine-like production style, stopping now and then to look at the pieces with a more critical eye. 

The process in this series is to find a shape in nature, usually from my gardens, create a painting, disassemble the painting, reassemble it, add a circle and work to uncover the lines within the circle. This idea of surface and lines is a recurring one in the art that I’ve produced all the way back to graduate school where I mapped the holes in the walls of our gallery space for my final show. I have also worked extensively in cross stitch with black thread to create additive and reductive squares that are framed together. 

And then there is the idea of working with a grid. The grid represents order and stability for me. It allows me to organize unpredictable small parts into a whole. Building on the grid with small pieces helps me chunk the work and chip away at it over time which is a more realistic way for me to find time to create. 

About the Artist:  Anne Brooks is a Lexington based artist and public school art educator, teaching middle and elementary school for over 20 years. Anne has worked in stone, wax, bronze, fibers and currently acrylic painting and collage. Besides her artistic endeavors, Anne is a passionate gardener. Her current work uses the shapes and colors of her gardens as the inspiration for her painted collages. Over the past few years, Anne has shown work at a variety of places, including PRHBTN shows, The Living Arts & Science Center, The Midway Library and Sisohpromatem Art Foundation. Anne is a graduate of the University of the Arts (BFA) and The University of Pennsylvania (MFA) both with an emphasis in sculpture, as well as being a National Board Certified Teacher.