By Martin
Stillion
Photos by Jimi Lott
Brooks is often in her Queen Anne studio for six to eight hours
a day.
"Horn on Oriental Carpet" was created when Brooks placed
a French horn together with the vibrant red Oriental carpet that covers
her living room floor.
A Russian cellist at Augustana College became the subject
of "Cello Professor."
Before you answer that question, consider the paintings of Seattle
Pacific University alumna Jackie Brooks '57. Musical images — instruments,
players, even sheet music — fill Brooks' artwork, just as they've filled
her life. "A number of people look at my paintings and say they actually
hear music," she says. "A psychoanalyst said he could hear the Dvorak
cello concerto."
Born in South Dakota, Brooks grew up in Longview, Washington, in the
1940s. She took piano lessons as a child until her mother sold a small
farm she'd inherited and bought a violin for Jackie and a cello for her
sister, Virginia. Brooks began studying the violin in the fifth grade. But
she also wanted to paint — and when she was a sophomore in high school,
Brooks recalls, "an art teacher whose forte was watercolor took a special
interest in me. ... I learned looseness and a lot of color, and not always
painting exactly what you see."
She enrolled at Seattle Pacific College in the mid-1950s, when the
school had no degree program, and only a smattering of courses, in the
visual arts. So she pursued her other great interest: a degree in music
education. She went on to teach both art and music, perform with the
Cascade Symphony, marry fellow alumnus David Brooks '58, and raise two
sons. (Jeff '83 is the principal bassist in Thalia Symphony, SPU's
orchestra-in-residence, and a senior writer at The Domain Group, a Seattle
advertising agency. Brooks' other son, Arthur, played the French horn and
now teaches economics at Georgia State University.) And she kept on
painting.
At last count, Brooks had been accepted into more than 70 such
competitions, and she took home awards from half of them. A member of
seven watercolor societies, she's recently shown her work in New York,
Montana, Texas, Oklahoma, Washington and Arizona. SPU's Art Center Gallery
showed several of her pieces at Homecoming 2001, and she's traveled as far
as Nicosia, Cyprus, to display paintings and conduct workshops.
Ten years ago, as a result of Parkinson's disease, Brooks had to put
her violin aside. She no longer had the fine motor control necessary to
play the instrument in an orchestra, although with medication she could
still use a paintbrush. But, she says, a new sense of urgency infused
her work: "I thought, 'I don't have time to do conventional paintings
any more. I need to express what I really feel inside.' Some of it was
anger; some was elation." And as a Christian, she felt the need to be
honest about her experience. So she developed a bold, assertive style
characterized by intense colors and strong emotions, and she chose to
focus on subjects that held deep personal relevance for her.
That meant lots of music paintings and family portraits, which cover
the walls of her Queen Anne home studio: her son Jeff immersed in the
sound of his string bass; her granddaughter Emma trying on one of Brooks'
own hats; her husband in the foreground of a Cyprian landscape. Though the
topics are personal, there's plenty in Brooks' work for others to
appreciate. One of her biggest fans, Seattle violin dealer Rafael
Carrabba, displays several of her paintings in his shop, and even sells
postcard prints of them.
Sometimes she'll transform an old work by painting a new one on top of
it, and there's always more than meets the eye: A row of organ pipes serve
double duty as champagne flutes. A tiger morphs into a French horn.
Shadowy forms inhabit the panes of a stained glass window — possibly,
Brooks suggests, they're reflections of the artisans who built the church.
Brooks believes her unconventional approach has helped her make the
leap from pretty paintings to beautiful ones: "People who don't know much
about art will often say,'Oh, how pretty.' Beauty goes beyond pretty
because it moves into the soul of the painter, and it brings out a
knowledge that sometimes you don't even know is there."
Perhaps, then, her own dictum — "not always painting exactly what you
see" — doesn't quite do her work justice. You could say that Brooks does
paint what she sees; it's just that she's learned to look at things a
little differently.
Editor's Note: To view 40 of Jackie Brooks' paintings in color,
click here.
Heard any good watercolors lately?
Eventually her husband, David, returned
to Seattle Pacific to teach mathematics. The school's art program had
grown in the meantime, and Brooks herself came back to earn a visual arts
degree and subsequently to teach watercolor techniques. "She's not someone
who just sits in her house and paints," says SPU Professor of Art Larry
Metcalf. "She gets out and tries to find shows, and works on national
competitions."
Brooks' style is hard to peg — it's
a carefree blend of expressionism and realism, neither completely abstract
nor fully representational. "I would say that it is quite experimental,
and it is emotional, and usually too big to be in anybody's house," she
says. "I would really like to get into having my paintings hung in public
places where there's a lot of space."
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