Andrea Brooks - Drawings
October 22, 2022Where are you, Andrea Brooks? I’ve got your sketchbooks, and I want to return them - better late than never. I also have two of those autograph books that kids get when they graduate from elementary or junior high school. I’ve had all these things 1973, when I graduated from Columbia College and moved into an apartment in Washington Heights, sharing it with three others, grad students or recent grads like me. Apparently the sketchbooks had been left behind. No one else was interested, and no one who’d been there already knew anything about you, so I imagine there had been a gap of a year or two between your time there and mine. But I was (and am) an artist, and I was very impressed with your work, so I kept them, all these years.
Amazing drawings and sketches in pencil and in ink, even a silverpoint drawing. Studies of the work of classical and Renaissance artists, naturalistic drawings of small animals - especially guinea pigs and a duckling. (You had guinea pigs named Ginger and Albee.) Portraits of people you must have known - an old couple, a young man. Fantasy sketches intended for children’s books, with animated dolls, flying rabbits and plush toys, their compositions sometimes recalling Baroque paintings in church domes. Realistic interiors - the homiest drawing of a hearth I’ve ever seen - and studies of pitchers and cups and such, one entitled “Hobbit Things”. Several of them I liked so much I matted them; two I even framed and have had on my walls wherever I have lived over the years. One in particular, “It Was Again the Season of Rains”, a simple pen and ink drawing that seems to me a take on Adam and Eve, and a reflection of the difficulties of being part of a loving couple, affected me deeply back then, and still does.
I sincerely beg your pardon for waiting so long to try to reach you. For years of course there wasn’t yet the internet. By the time it existed, I must admit, your things were below my radar. I’ve lived in Italy since 1996, and only “rediscovered” them late in 2021 when I moved all I owned. Not just clothing, books, and recorded music, but a ton (perhaps literally) of my own artwork, older and newer - paintings, prints, and photographs, plus tools and equipment, art materials and old papers. And not just from my old house, but from a good-sized studio that I had occupied. At my new, smaller place I had to put everything in order again, and inventory the artwork. So I came across your sketchbooks again, and resolved to finally do something about them. I opened your autograph book from elementary school, and read on the first inside page, “If this book should chance to roam, box its ears and send it home!”
This little rhyme was a powerful and emotional nudge, as I myself have by now a lot to look back on, especially being so forcibly immersed lately in the residue of my own life. I googled your name, but your name is rather generic, so that was no help. I found a site devoted to the graduates of Macomb Junior High, but got no news from your erstwhile schoolmates. So I am resorting to more public means, a blog article, which I’d already thought of with respect to your work. So now I will cease to address myself directly to you, Andrea, and will address myself to the reader and viewer of the blog, and discuss the drawings from an artistic perspective. I majored in art history, and though I was not cut out to be an academic, I did acquire some critical and comparative faculties in college and over the years since, which for better or worse are borne out in some of the other articles in this blog.
By the way, dear viewer, any of the images here can be enlarged with a click - only a little in the case of the vertical compositions, but considerably in the case of the horizontals.
In most cases I’ve posted cropped images of Andrea’s drawing, the better to show the details of her delicate pencil or pen strokes. Occasionally I show instead the whole sheet, when I felt it more important to show how she placed her subject on the page. In one case I show something by another artist that seems a useful comparison. Leaving aside the drawings that are clearly rough sketches - studies that would surely be executed with more care in a definitive version - Andrea’s style varies from great precision to a softer or looser kind of rendition. Some subjects are taken from life - what she saw around her, such as a vase of flowers or a person who posed for her, or was just there. Others are copies or studies of works by other artists that she made, the better to know the artist’s work. These studies often specify the artist, but a few drawings with no such indication suggest to me nonetheless, mainly from their subjects, that they were copied from another artist.
The three main sketchbooks in my custody I have numbered I, II, and III - arbitrarily, as I have no way of knowing for sure their chronological order.
Sketchbook I - Aquabee Quickie Sketch Pad, 5” x 8”. Inside the front cover is her name and address in The Bronx.
Among the first drawings in this book are one of a nun, one of a long-haired young woman with a downcast face, a study of a closed fist, a profile of an old woman, nude, and a study of a crouching nude woman borrowed from Degas. The last of these is done in blue ballpoint pen, it seems, and the others are in pencil. All are characterized by careful line work with modulated strokes, augmented by delicate shading, which is true of most of her drawings. That of the nun - which may be a study of another artist’s work, rather than a portrait - suggests to me an interest in people of devotion, or more generally in the life, art, and mentalities of the medieval and Renaissance. I suspect also that the drawing of the old woman, nude, thin with sagging breasts, is a study from the work of another artist, and possibly from a sculpture rather than a drawing or painting - she could be by Rodin. The woman with a downcast face, however, seems a modern type with her long straight hair. (Her attitude is much like that of the woman in another drawing, seen below, “Again It Was the Season of Rains”, although the style is very different.)
Two drawings - of an old woman and an old man - are rougher in style. Just the same they are evocative, and full of character despite the neutral expressions of the subjects. They were perhaps done with charcoal, or a softer pencil than usual. Given their immediacy, I’d bet they were done from life - possibly her grandparents. Brooks has been freer with proportions here, their necks long and their shoulders very round, waistlines high, and arms hanging limply at their sides. Rough though they are, they were not done casually, but rather with great attention. The still life of a vase of flowers is looser in style, but not careless.
Two drawings are especially precise: one of an Asian boy, and one of a girl with a decidedly asymmetric face, one eye much below the other. The boy’s face is also asymmetric, but less noticeably so. Possibly she worked from photographs, but I can’t be certain. It’s challenging to render precisely a young and perhaps jumpy or impatient subject, and easier to reproduce attentively the details of a photograph. The portrait of the girl reminds me strongly of the way Lucian Freud worked in his earlier days, before he adopted a more “painterly” style.
In this sketchbook there are also several pages of studies of interiors of churches, or quite possibly the Gothic arches at the Cloisters in New York (a place I know well), which I don’t include here. I suspect this book is the earliest of the three, as she seems less self-assured here at times than in the other books.
Sketchbook II - Artist’s Sketch Book, 6 1/2” x 8 1/2”. Brand X (no trade name here). On the front cover is a reproduction of a rather perfunctory charcoal sketch of an old fat tree with only a few branches remaining at its crown. (It’s executed with about the level of skill that we used to see in the ads at the back of comic books and popular magazines for correspondence courses in art, the kind that say, “You can learn to draw!”) However, the sketch of the tree has been augmented by an elaborate, free-form doodle that extends the tree and fills the whole cover, but working from the tree instead of simply obliterating it. Although casual, this is no easy thing that she’s done - the higher doodling.
Her most naturalistic style seems reserved for her many delightful drawings of small animals. They are precise and carefully finished, with great attention to detail, but without the sharp linear precision that characterizes those of the aforementioned boy and girl. One senses her affection, too, in these drawings, for the guinea pig Ginger and her companion Albee.
Then there are several rough sketches that seem to have been made with small children in mind, as illustrations for a book. In one, a blanket is spread as if for a picnic, attended by children and animals, a live cat and perhaps a stuffed animal. One child pushes another - or a doll - on a swing. The border is decorated with flowers and elephants. There’s a caption I can’t fully make out, only “There may be…but…heaven…”.
Another picnic scene is attended by guinea pigs with wings and a rag doll, and another guinea pig coming in for a landing with a doll passenger on its back. A homey cottage lies in the background with a smokestack out in front, a sun and a crescent moon. Above there’s a small figure dancing and two dolls having a tea party.
Another shows a winged horse, a flying rabbit, and a bird with two figures aboard, surrounded by cumulus clouds. The tondo or circular form suggests the dome paintings of heaven seen in many churches.
In another with a touch of the Baroque, two figures (one whose head is surrounded by sunflower petals) support a sphere, above which gambol several flying creatures - a pair of guinea pigs and a rag doll. Behind them all is a great winged bull, its wings spread protectively, with light emerging from a cloud above.
In yet another, two figures sit astride a winged horse in the middle of a great emanation of light, with other figures flying around them, dolls with bonnet or fez, and a pair of guinea pigs, one wielding a teapot. Below all this is a ball of yarn. In the upper part of the sheet, there’s a picnic scene with dolls and animals, a flying horse, and a plush penguin.
On one especially delightful page, at the center is a fantasy castle that could be made of candy, with soap bubbles floating above, and a crescent moon with a face. The steps approaching the castle are a series of buttons. Below is a sort of Raggedy-Ann doll, and to the side a candy-striped barber pole. Above are studies of a rabbit and a plush lamb, two faint studies of a child’s face, one with arms, preliminary sketches for the long-haired girl at a table, smiling as she draws.
There are also a few freestyle drawings with fantasy shapes combined with more realistic or at least identifiable things. One shows what could be undersea creatures, one of them suggesting an octopus with cap like a Chinese pillar, another perhaps a diatom, and a turtle’s head with a snake’s body. Just below, a very faint kneeling child and a sawfish. In another, the central subject is a mushroom with a ziggurat-like head. In still another, what looks like the mouth of an anemone, and a very strange creature, Boschian except for its amiable air, with a pair of antler-like protuberances that culminate in ovular forms with faint smiling faces. At the center is a small study of a cherub holding the stem of a flower, amplified just above with a plump bearded elf in a similar posture, who wears a nightcap and Winnie-the-Pooh pajamas. And if that’s not enough, above the elf is a boat - or a tortoise - with two passengers, pulled along by a balloon or an orb or sun with a smiling face. There’s a lot to see here. I’d love to know the circumstances of the inspirations of these drawings!
Sketchbook III - Artist’s Sketch Book, 6 1/2” x 8 1/2”, identical to the Brand X of number II, but without the psychedelic doodle. At the top the artist has written “Mother Earth on Baking Day” - a rich and beautiful concept!
In this sketchbook the artist has returned to direct observation. With few exceptions, all the drawings are done with pen and ink, usually sepia, with occasional touches of color. There is a fine landscape, and two pages of peppers with all their convolutions, and a fig. I like especially a pencil drawing of an exotic fish with protruding eyes.
Others represent domestic items, like crockery, a rocking chair, an old-fashioned bed with a magnificent quilt, a dresser, bookcase, and a hassock with a marvelous tasseled cover. There is also a sketch of the entrance to what I take to be a covered terrace with wooden columns, a flagstone floor inside.
Another drawing shows a mantel clock with a recess below the clock face, a model of a beehive on a platform inside - a wonderful detail that’s easy to miss if you don’t look closely. To the right is perhaps a Man of Sorrows in a frame, and a small picture of either a bear or a raccoon with a walking stick. The mantel itself is elaborately carved. Elsewhere there is a grindstone drawn twice in careful perspective. There is a bearded young man drawn twice on one page, barefoot and very comfortably dressed - above he sits in a modern-styled chair, below in an upholstered chair, his feet resting on a hassock spread with an embroidered cloth.
The ultimate in coziness and gemütlichkeit exudes from the drawing of the brick hearth with two chairs in front and a rug covering the stone floor. (We see the rocking chair and the upholstered chair elsewhere as well.) Closely related is the close-up drawing of items at the foot of a hearth - a broom and pitcher, with a bowl, two cups, and a warming pan or bed warmer with an elaborate design. This I had taken to be a plate, then I saw the same item drawn obliquely with a small pitchfork and broom. I had to look this one up, as I didn’t know the name! It resembles a popcorn popper, but I knew that couldn’t be right. (A bed warmer was slid quickly over the surface of a bed to warm it up before bedtime, but it can also be used to transport embers. The term was also used jokingly or affectionately to refer to the person you share your bed with! For example, the English used to refer to the chambermaid as a “Scottish bed warmer”.)
The pitcher, bowl, and cups I take to be of decorated enamel, with a Japanese cherry-blossom motif. We see them again in a subsequent drawing it the sketchbook, entitled by the artist “Hobbitt (sic) Tea Cups & Pottery”. The pitcher seems to be the very same one; instead of the tall cups there are teacups of a more classic shape, a teapot, and a plate, all with the same cherry-blossom motif. There are also saucers of a kind previously unknown to me - besides the usual receptacle for the cup, there is a somewhat irregular space to the side, perhaps intended to rest a tea ball or teaspoon. (I’m no expert on the home furnishings of Hobbits, but I am surprised by this Japanese style.) A similar page, entitled “Hobbit Things”, shows a vase and bowls - but of a different style of decoration - and a few other objects I’m hard-put to identify. One is probably an inkwell with its own tray, another a vase or a penholder with gargoyle-like figures at its base. And possibly a napkin ring? At any rate, it’s clear that Frodo lives.
On the last page of the sketchbook - not a sheet like the rest, just a lightweight end page, pale blue - is a story, “Butterfly Man”, intended for a series of drawings for a book, though the artist’s notes read at points like a storyboard for a film project. There are notes of things wants to sketch for it. It deals with a man in a meadow who envies the butterflies, and then realizes he has turned into a butterfly - a metamorphosis into a creature known for exactly that.
There are also several loose sheets, generally larger than the sketchbooks. There is a page of eyes studied from Jean Fouquet, Rubens, Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo, Titian, and Leonardo. The Fouquet eyes come from his Melun Diptych of 1450, those of Etienne Chevalier as donor. The Leonardo are the eyes of his Head of a Girl of 1483 (a drawing I copied myself back then in charcoal). The Dürer eyes are seen again in her full copy of Dürer’s portrait of his mother. She has also done a study of Holbein’s portrait of John Fisher. There’s a hand - an open palm - a bit ungainly in the proportion, perhaps arthritic, but with delicate lines, and a superb page with fine, delicate studies of a duckling. And just to show that Ms. Brooks can hold her own against the greats, I’ve added for comparison Dürer’s tempera painting of a pair of squirrels, one munching on a hazelnut.
(Note that these are red squirrels, very endangered these years in Europe, having been driven out by the American gray squirrel, which some damned fool must have introduced. I’ve heard that the gray squirrels carry a disease to which they are resistant, but not the reds. I’ve seen only one red squirrel since 1996 in a wooded area near Torino, and although he seemed in perfect shape, he was stone dead. It was as if he had fallen out of the oak tree that I found him under - which is inconceivable.)
There are two very pale, delicate still life arrangements, and a good pencil sketch of a young man (who happens to resemble me at that age). There is a silver-point study of a woman (on brown paper), I suspect adopted from a drawing by a well-known artist of the past. Another is truly sui generis, a drawing in pen and ink of a couple (shown above near the top), cast-down in mood and most likely in the theological sense as well, like Adam and Eve. To the side are foliage and flowers, and the beautiful calligraphic inscription “It Was Again The Season Of The Rains”. Its style strikes me as part medieval, part Pre-Raphaelite, part 1960s. This struck me very greatly back then, and has lost none of its power and depth in all these years since.
Besides all this, there is at least one drawing I like very much that I haven’t been able to locate. I can see it my mind’s eye - it’s an interior done in pen an ink, an oblique view looking down on a man lying on a sofa, his head in the foreground and his feet extending into the background. It’s much more finished than most of Brooks’s work, with more detail. I’ll keep looking, but meanwhile I want to post this article before any more time goes by.
Andrea, I hope you are well. If you read this, or someone who knows you should read this, get in touch via allen@allenschill.com, and I will respond, toot sweet.
Allen Schill
October, 2022
Torino, Italy
Drawings by Andrea Brooks, Addendum
Well, I found Andrea’s “missing” sketchbook, right on my bookshelf, about butt-level. If it had been a baby crocodile, it would have bit me where the good lord split me. I was ordering and dusting the shelves (a rare event), and saw a slip of cardboard sticking out of a book - a strip of bus ticket used for a bookmark. And there it was. I took a good look at the sketchbook right away, my favorite pages already bookmarked, and photographed many sketches - too many - the next day. From these I’ve chosen the best, most representative examples of the various types of drawings Andrea has done. But it wasn’t easy.
Sketchbook IV - 8 1/2” x 11”.
Inside the front cover is a name and address in Manhattan. There are also a few notes about possible projects, one of them (“Butterfly Man”) elaborated further in another sketchbook. There is as well a list of animals she had drawn, or intended to draw. There is also a page or so of a hand-written text with some very high-flying observations - I’m inclined to say lysergic. She draws analogies between the cells of the body and civilization as a whole. Heady stuff. I don’t get this deep on just a glass of wine or two.
There’s a page with two wonderful drawings in pen and ink of a nude man, semi-reclining, and a few pages later a similar drawing of a trousered man in a comfy chair. What I love about them is her long, thready pen-strokes, almost like candy floss or the web of a tent spider - many repeated strokes, close together, that define the form. There are a couple of other drawings (not included here), free-form, where she uses a similar technique to create a sort of tornado effect - one a bit psychedelic to my eyes.
Another free-form drawing is definitely psychedelic, if I have to peg it as of a certain style, which is already reductive. In fact, I hate to characterize the work of anyone I don’t know better, but this doesn’t look to me like the doodles some people idly make while they are on the telephone. (Some people object to the term psychedelic for that very reductionism, and I can’t dispute the notion. I prefer the term lysergic, but I must admit that its only advantage is its being less popularly known. The fact remains that many artists who came along in the 1960s and 1970s were profoundly influenced by LSD, mescaline, mushrooms, and so forth. Another fact remains, for some: an unfair stigmatization suffered by those influenced in this way. If people who hold such prejudices would think instead of the holy stigmata of the crucified Christ, and all they mean - quite a lot, you can’t imagine - perhaps they would be more open-minded about those who chose - and still choose - this kind of extraordinary experience.) The overall form suggests a tree, or perhaps a uterus and a set of ovaries, but I only reproduce the upper part of the page here (for reasons of space, and because the intricate detail demands to be appreciated. There are organic shapes that suggest many things, but they never quite resolve into anything really identifiable, and that’s exactly what’s thrilling.
There’s a very fine sketch in pen and ink of a hilly landscape, with a wonderful feeling of light and openness.
There is the drawing that stuck most vividly in my mind when I couldn’t find the sketchbook - the oblique view of the man on the sofa. It’s done in pen and ink, mostly sepia, but with some black and a few touches of yellow, as well as a few strokes of white pastel. She has drawn the fringe on the blanket that covers the sofa with considerable delicacy. I think this is the same man that we have seen in several other drawings, and he has served as an excellent model for Andrea. He seems to have been very good at relaxing, a capacity not to be underestimated.
Another drawing, not quite as worked-up, is especially ambitious in presenting a drawing within a drawing. On a double-page spread of her sketchbook, Andrea gives us her own point of view, including her own left arm holding the sketchbook along with the view of the sofa with a couple of dolls and a pair of ducklings (possibly real, considering her affinity with animals), and within that, a second view of the same scene, reduced! It’s like a hall of mirrors.
There’s a pencil drawing of two guinea pigs, Whiskers and Susi, curled up together. Apart from the obvious cuteness of the subject (very expressive of the artist’s feelings, whether “cute” appeals to you or not - you may have seen too many photos of adorable kittens and puppies), one has to note Andrea’s sensitive use of the pencil, something few can match.
More descriptive and precise, but equal testimony to Andrea’s talent, is a page of nineteen insects (not counting the larval and mature stages of one lepidopterus whose name I can’t make out), all labeled. Although she probably worked from photos rather than from life (her usual practice with animal subjects), her renderings are sensitive and delicate, not simply hard-edged.
The same could be said for some of her other drawings of non-domestic animals: frogs, oppossums, badgers, raccoons, porcupines, tortoises, hares, woodchucks (or groundhogs), squirrels, chipmunks, skunks, and mice. (Again, for reasons of space, I’ve included only a few of many worthy examples of her work.) She often annotates the drawings with brief comments about the animals’ habits in the wild. (In the sketchbook there’s a small flyer offering a field guide to animal tracks - clearly she was as curious as any serious naturalist. Her hare is indicated as a varying hare - the same as the snowshoe hare - called varying because its coat changes to white in the winter months. I’ve heard of the snowshoe hare, but I’d never heard of the varying hare before, as such.) Given the hints in the other sketchbooks, it seems she was thinking of assignments in illustration, whether for children’s books or books on nature.
So, Andrea, I ask again, where are you? I have another hint in a name I found in this sketchbook, which may help me find you. My best wishes to you, and I hope you have been continuing with your marvelous work.
Allen Schill
December 16, 2022, Torino, Italy
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