Brooksby

Brooksby demonstrated a facility for drawing at an early age. Accompanying her father for business trips, her family travelled constantly throughout the United States. From this itinerant childhood, the American artist developed a real appetite for travelling. At age eight, she was already studying drawing from models at the University of California at Los Angeles. Two years later, she was an apprentice for a Japanese ceramist in West Virginia. She then became interested in photography. Her photographs won her several scholarships, including a senatorial scholarship as well as the most prestigious award from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. At the school of Fine Arts, she discovered a passion for sculpture and earned her degree in 1987, just before leaving for Florence, Italy, where she settled for more than twenty years.
Her love affair with painting began in the Tuscan countryside, during scooter rides. Then she began travelling with her easel and canvas hung on the baggage rack. For ten years, she worked in the open air on the streets of Florence where the major U.S. media would come to meet her. She opened a studio and gallery in the historic centre of the Italian city to paint and organize exhibitions. In 2006, her wandering spirit woke up, and on visiting Paris for a weekend, she decided to settle there. The French capital inspired her first urban scenes, now a major focus of her work.
Brooksby considers herself a colourist and devotes part of her paintings to the ""blue hour"", the in-between part of the day that is neither day nor night. For her oil paintings, the artist uses her photographs as models. She boasts membership to the current American ""Contemporary Realism"". Deeply rooted in the reality of the moment, her works are intended to be evidence of an era.