Born in Chicago in 1953, her parents students of the University of Chicago, Brooke took to painting at a very young age. She was a hyper kid and painting calmed her down. After doodling through school, she studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago before pursuing a science major at Bard College. After graduation she went to Vienna, Austria where she continued her painting studies at the Art Academy in the storied Baroque city. Here, Brooke explored gestural figurative painting, hurling fluid material onto the surface to create silhouettes. In 1996, Brooke moved to the South of Portugal, where she learned to apply Cezanne’s color space to glowing landscapes of olive and almond trees. In 2008, Brooke moved to New York City. In 2009, she founded Radical Art Initiative, a collaborative to create visuals, signs and street theater for social action. In 2011 she moved to Peekskill, a river town just north of Manhattan. There, in a spacious studio, Brooke developed her signature method of squirting the paint directly out of the bottle onto the canvas, called “Flow Painting”. In 2017 was the publication of her art book, “The Waterdrinkers”, funded through Kickstarter. A book release was held on 4/29/17 at Quimby’s Bookstore, Brooklyn. In 2018, wanting to live in nature, Brooke moved to a remote area of Northern California, where mountain views, tenacious vegetation and knarly pines present a daily inspiration for her work. In 2021 she had a solo show at the Little Raven Gallery in San Francisco entitled “New Paintings”. In January, 2022 Brooke had a one-month artist residency at the 18th St. Arts Center in Santa Monica, California. The Los Angeles SPRING/BREAK Art Show included a solo booth of her paintings and sculptures, curated by Fashion Moda West, in February 2022.
