As a practicing artist during the 1980s and 90s, I belonged to that generation of young women who owed a great deal to Hope Brooks as a mentor, role model and as a creator of a type of feminist art peculiar to the Caribbean region. In those days, our feminism did not shout its protests, rather it was manifest in quiet multi-layered surfaces that smoldered internally and made statements revealed over time. As I have noted elsewhere, during the 1980s: “ …feminism was a luxury and ‘female bonding’ was not encouraged. That tacit code of silence that seems to be an inevitable aspect of middle class morality also pervaded the arts. Perhaps one visible manifestation of this was the prevalence of textured and collaged surfaces, visual poetry, graffiti, and layered surfaces that obscured the viewer from a clear reading of a painting’s content. This veiled imagery, though enigmatic, was often little more than a smoke screen for disquiet. Many could read beneath the troubled surfaces, but we kept each other’s secrets safe.”
With hindsight, it is easier to discern the way that Hope Brook’s characteristic style marked all our works. Her iconography was taken from nature; that place to which so many of us retreated during those politically turbulent years. Back then, her work was domestic in scale and she taught us that we could work from home, work on our laps, or seated on the floor, rather than upright at easels in studios that we could neither find, nor afford. She taught us that we could create inner worlds within small surfaces that could communicate our concern, in ways even more provocative than the larger stretched canvases of macho-museum environments. And, through her choice of subject matter, she taught us the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm and the importance of each painstaking mark or brushstroke. She revealed the power of meditation and showed us how the windows and doors of our imagination could become escape routes to places of personal safety and even bliss. Most importantly, through her paintings she allowed us access to her humanity, and showed us how to give voice to a form of expression that is peculiarly our own.
Today, Hope’s artwork is not restricted to canvas, over the years she has worked in different media ranging from pastels and watercolors on paper, to oils and acrylics on canvas. More recently, she has become interested in digitized images, photocopying snapshots, letters and memorabilia onto canvas and then, unifying them with her own innate sense of balance and composition. This assemblage of suspended scroll-like sheets of canvas, document her journey as a painter and person and is aptly titled: Self Portrait – In Search of the Essence of Life. Provocatively, she challenges her viewers with imagery that covers a lifetime of experience, exploration, and example to others.
© PA-S
February 2008
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