In her very fine visual memoir, painter LeeAnn Brook weaves tales about creativity that go deep into her own process. Each image in the book has a story, and a history that links it to other images and to the artist’s life and her previous work.

The beauty of Brook’s work is unassailable, and the level of craft is obvious on every page. Nature is her muse, particularly rivers, ponds, and trees. Brook grew up in New England in a small town and her visual loves originate in an unspoiled landscape. This book is a brave, intimate look at the life of a painter, at the roots of her creativity, and at how she sees the world.

This beautiful book will fascinate and delight you. Explore LeeAnn Brook’s resonant photographs and paintings, which influence each other. Her visual taste and her love of nature and color are expressed eloquently in both media. But the relationships between the two art forms are never literal. She may, years later, re-interpret a mood, pattern or texture that reflects something seen in another place and time. A photograph of a mosaic in the Sistine Chapel inspires a painting of a garden. A photograph of light on a Victorian fence inspires a painting of weeping birch trees. A photograph of a tile roof in Siena inspires a painting of afternoon light on a river. I love this book!

In LeeAnn Brook’s radiant paintings, juxtapositions of motion and stasis, form and line motivate her brilliant work with color. Tree trunks, horizon lines, grasses or branches, striations of light crossing a creek, position the vibrant washes of light that would seem to lift off the canvas in an exuberance of color. In some of the paintings, the solidity of bulky granite boulders seems to contain the iridescent water that pools nearby, or the light reflecting flat surfaces of boulders contrast with the nearly transparent water coursing past them. Though Brook’s work is more dense with color, her dialogue among elements of shape and light, as in “Fall Light,” is reminiscent of Turner’s shimmering land and cityscapes where ghostly forms appear and dissolve. In other images, for example “Crimson Clover” or “Unbridled,” shapes emerge from Klimt-like applications of color to shape an impression of organic forms. 

In her reflections on her process, which is the central concern of this beautiful book, Brook writes that she is deeply intrigued with the mysteries of life, “…beneath, on, or above the surface,” and that she is enlivened by painting natural imagery because “…nothing is stationary.” Another focus of Brook’s contemplation of her process is how she is inspired by her experiences of natural landscapes and her memories of natural shapes and colors which release and direct her brush: “My paintbrush recalls that memory as the lines reappear in the patterns of vegetation….”  Brook’s photographs seem to capture and frame an image, as though to augment her memories. But her paintings scintillate, color light shape and line scarcely bound by canvas or frame.