Pegan Brooke, who taught painting at the San Francisco Art Institute since 1985, creates ethereal abstract works that take their cues from the natural environment. Marked by rising and receding color fields punctuated by clearly defined forms - geometric shapes, shells, leaves - Brooke's canvases communicate a sense of awe of the world around her, enveloping the viewer in meditative depictions of beauty that alternately soothe and stimulate. Her imagery is both familiar and otherworldly, inviting reflection and suggesting the possibility for transcendence by contemplation.
A longtime resident of the Bay Area, Brooke received her MFA from Stanford University. She has exhibited her work internationally and in represented in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York.
– by Anne Crump Ray (April 2007)
River / Sea Statement 2010
Certain places exert an undeniable impulse to paint them, to try to understand what they might mean through the creative process. These new paintings are inspired by the experiences of sustained reflection upon the Aven River in Pont Aven, France and the Pacific Ocean near my home in Northern California. My intention is to find a way to communicate the fleeting quality of experience and the flowing nature of being, a present that recommences unceasingly, and our own individual and collective responses to that experience.
The smaller paintings reference the river, in a particular moment of its relentless trajectory to the sea. Looking at the river, with all the obstacles, changes in course and detours made me think of how it feels to make one’s way through the complications of life. The larger paintings reference the Pacific Ocean and represent how life at certain special moments can feel spacious, communal, and capable of holding all possibilities. This suggests how life could be and reflects this notion back to us for our consideration.
This new work is meant to provide a sense of spaciousness, in which the viewer is invited to slow down, reflect, and trust one’s own intuition and sensations as to the meaning received. I hope that these paintings can be received through the senses, the body, the heart and the spirit. As all life is in constant flux, I imagine that the ‘meaning’ these works embody will continuously shift from moment to moment, viewer to viewer. - Pegan Brooke January 2010
A longtime resident of the Bay Area, Brooke received her MFA from Stanford University. She has exhibited her work internationally and in represented in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York.
– by Anne Crump Ray (April 2007)
River / Sea Statement 2010
Certain places exert an undeniable impulse to paint them, to try to understand what they might mean through the creative process. These new paintings are inspired by the experiences of sustained reflection upon the Aven River in Pont Aven, France and the Pacific Ocean near my home in Northern California. My intention is to find a way to communicate the fleeting quality of experience and the flowing nature of being, a present that recommences unceasingly, and our own individual and collective responses to that experience.
The smaller paintings reference the river, in a particular moment of its relentless trajectory to the sea. Looking at the river, with all the obstacles, changes in course and detours made me think of how it feels to make one’s way through the complications of life. The larger paintings reference the Pacific Ocean and represent how life at certain special moments can feel spacious, communal, and capable of holding all possibilities. This suggests how life could be and reflects this notion back to us for our consideration.
This new work is meant to provide a sense of spaciousness, in which the viewer is invited to slow down, reflect, and trust one’s own intuition and sensations as to the meaning received. I hope that these paintings can be received through the senses, the body, the heart and the spirit. As all life is in constant flux, I imagine that the ‘meaning’ these works embody will continuously shift from moment to moment, viewer to viewer. - Pegan Brooke January 2010
Pegan Brooke