well we are still rolling with the punches and adapting to the ever changing uncontrollable world. seeing all the new amazing work being created in our artist’s studios is keeping us motivated and inspired daily. looking at beautiful artwork cannot help but lift your spirits! hidell brooks is committed to exhibiting our artist’s work and supporting the art community as a whole. times are changing and we are adapting by moving all announcements to social media. please visit our website www.hidellbrooks.com to sign up to receive emails and/or follow us on instagram @hidellbrooks for all that is going on as we embrace virtual exhibitions. we are hoping to be back open for appointment only by mid may with regular exhibitions starting this summer.
our may invitation was printed before everything shutdown so look in your mailbox this week. we have been mailing out invites to exhibitions for 22 years contemplating each stamp used and taking great care in pairing artists shown together. we will continue but for now we will take a break and look forward to resuming soon. think of the invite as a preview of good things to come! you can also view all new work by rana rochat, nate rogers + kim testone on our website.
starting next week on the blog we will be featuring a q & a series over the month of may with rana, nate and kim to give you a better insight into their work. stay tuned!
“my idea is that too explicit narratives tend to overshadow intuition, gut feelings and the profound experience of mystery and joy that a painting has the potential to provide. my forms and marks, with their apparent weight, particular vitality, and inertia live in an environment i try to render luminous and transparent. i inscribe, blot, stroke, scrape and drip. the primary focus is to convey rhythm and cadence through color, line, and forms. as such, they are purely expressive or lyrical, with no other intended narration. my paintings are there for viewers to run their mind free.
my most recent paintings are moving toward a desire for increased openness, letting color and space within the piece play a more prominent role in achieving a balanced and lively visual environment, where forms, line and marks coexist. my focus is on the complex relationship between forms, marks, color and depth; how they interact to form and balance the painting. the encaustic medium involves a lot of scraping through multiple layers of wax. the final product is what remains, getting to the essence of the piece.”
“as our interpersonal interactions increasingly give way to digital ones, our authentic selves are replaced with curated ones. we share a limited toolkit of shapes and symbols used to reduce our complex human experience to basic tropes. grasping for connection, we assign emojis and other reductionist symbols to our states of mind, sent out unsolicited to our digital audience of friends and faux to interpret.”
“ although i often paint food and desserts, this body of work is more sentimental for me, focusing on some favorite treats and memories from my childhood: my grandma’s love of ice cream cones, my dad’s daily PB&J’s, packaged snacks from the main street market, homemade cherry pie oozing on the plate, and my mom making beautifully messy ice cream sundaes for me and my sister. infused with nostalgia and a bit of whimsy, the paintings aren’t intended to honor the foods themselves as much as to transport viewers back to some simpler moments in their own lives. some of the paintings, like the trompe l’oeil candy bars, are to scale, while others are drastically over-scaled. with each piece, i hope the viewer feels a little bit of magic and child-like joy that maybe he or she thought was lost. my painting process is quite time-consuming, requiring great degrees of intensity and patience. each piece consists of dozens of thin, translucent layers of fast-drying acrylic paint, often mixed with a satin glazing medium. rather than working from left to right, i work more from back to front, building my layers slowly and methodically. i attack many areas of the paintings in each painting session, adding lots of details and layers which eventually coalesce to create some illusion of realism. i like to think the complexity of my painting process adds to the complexity of my pieces, just like the memories I attach to them. ”
all available work by each artists can be viewed on our website under the artist page under each individual tab. click on the artist’s name to bring up all work with sizing and pricing. please call the gallery if you have any further questions.