ARTIST NETWORK
KELSEY BROOKS
2009-2010 Monument Snowboards Memento Mori
Location: San Diego, CA
Profile
Consciousness has two states of being in this world, aware and unaware. Awareness is the state you are in at the moment if you are reading this unaware is what you were before and what you will be after you are aware. These paintings represent the only exception to that rule. Creation exists beyond the scope of physical parameters and universal constants, unseen by tangibility and rationality. A place where rules are fluid and dynamic, forever changing in accordance to the unknown. These paintings are a product of this place this limbo between 2 worlds. When I close my eyes these paintings arewhat I see. -Kelsey Brookes.
Kelsey Brookes was born in 1978. A formally trained scientist who spent years tracking viruses for the U.S. government, he now lives and works in San Diego as a painter. His art can be found broadly throughout the US and Europe and is represented internationally by the Lazarides gallery (London). Kelsey’s figurative paintings draw influence from Hindu and Buddhist deities, exotic animals, sex, and rustic American quilts. Each figure is adorned with ghostly representations of the natural world, animals and plants that unfold from the body into the surrounding canvas. His chimeras are frozen with animalistic intensity in explosive and sometimes tortured positions. Kelsey blames this raw, anxious form of art on the U.S. University system which refuses to teach its scientists how to draw.
