Suzanne Brooker

Artist Statement

My passion for the visual world and the pursuit of making images began at any early age and has motivated my work as an artist. How images evoke memory, create metaphor, or awakens an aesthetic response between viewer and artist has been an ongoing investigation. I work primarily from observation, often using my own photographs for landscape paintings, as well as newspaper images and works of other artists, historical and contemporary, as source material for my works.

         This series of paintings, Near Water, represents my affinity to the Northwest landscape. In these paintings, the depiction of water may not be the subject of the painting but its presence is always close by. Water is the element of change/direction that creates paths through the landscape. A trickster with many disguises, the dynamics of water is a constant challenge to render from the dancing currents of coastal water to the sculptural effects of a water course over rocky shores.

         I’ve been a Teaching Artist these last 20 years and began writing instructional books on drawing and painting in 2008. I hope to share with readers my insights and techniques that will further own artist practices: Portrait Painting Atelier (2010), Components of Landscape Oil Painting (2015) and Essential Techniques of Landscape Drawing (2018).