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Formats
Hardcover Details
  • 11/2014
  • 978-0-692-25772-2
  • 96 pages
  • $39.95
Points of Inspiration: An Artist's Journey with Painting and Photography
LeeAnn Brook, author
A book about the creative process and how one medium has inspired another, with glimpses into the author’s studio, her insights and personal vision.
Reviews
This magnificent debut from Brook, a photographer, painter, and graphic artist, showcases 150 full-color photographs and paintings by the artist, accompanied by her thoughtful reflections on the inspiration she derives from observing nature. Brook reveals that there is a wonderful serendipity to her work when she happens upon a “rusted boat... a cobblestone street... light on a quaking aspen.” New material frequently builds upon previous work, leading to an intriguing harmony between photographs and paintings: repetitive lines, textures, and colors from a weathered boat captured in a photograph show up years later in a painting of water lilies, and an intricate Victorian gate foretells a future color palette. Lavishly descriptive wording—“primal elements,” “quiet details,” “tapestry,” and “spontaneity”—enriches the narrative as Brooks provides an intimate explanation of her creative process. The paintings are vivid and scenic: a silver-gray reflection of tree lines and curves is reimagined in glorious colors, contours from a tile in Italy’s Sistine Chapel take on movement in a windy garden, and a rock pattern reflection becomes an abstract form. Brook’s artistry inspires throughout. (BookLife)
Eleanor Vincent, author of the award winning book, Swimming with Maya

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.

Paola Gianturco, photographer/author of In Her Hands, Celebrating Women, ¡VIVA

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!

Susan Suntree Author of the award-winning book Sacred Sites: The Secret History

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. 

News
05/08/2015
New Awards

"Points of Inspiration: An Artist's Journey with Painting and Photography" has just received three national awards: 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards National Silver Medal, Fine Art category; Winner in the Best Overall Design Non-Fiction category of the 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Awards; Finalist in the General Non-Fiction category of the 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Awards 

Formats
Hardcover Details
  • 11/2014
  • 978-0-692-25772-2
  • 96 pages
  • $39.95
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