Brooke Fitzsimons (b. Sydney) worked as a graphic designer in magazine production in Sydney for 10 years before she moved to London permanently. She completed both a BA in Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art (2001), and a Master of Research in Arts Practice, Chelsea College of Art, London (2013). She has exhibited in London and Sydney, and has paintings in private collections in UK, Europe, USA and Australia. Brooke now works at Excelsior Studios in Park Royal, London.

 

Collecting printed images and her own photographs as references, Brooke Fitzsimons makes her paintings by building up colour and images with transparent, oil paint glazes. She deliberately sets up formal oppositions: a flat silhouette versus tonal rendering; man-made forms versus natural ones; hard-edge versus soft-focus. For Fitzsimons this tension between two opposing extremes is a distilled representation of the tension of all human experience, the tension between reason and nature, between our inner world and the reality of existence. In her paintings, Fitzsimons aims to provoke a 'play' between abstraction and illusion, so they are held in a balancing act where neither is dominant. In this way, the flat surface of her paintings becomes an active threshold - an equivocal, playful field. 

 

"Their brushwork is hidden, their texture flattened by the constant back and forth of soft varnishing brushes. They seem to evolve subtly and mysteriously; depictions of natural forms slowly receding through layers of glazes into near invisibility. But a closer, longer look can take us past the sheen of the paint and the distancing effects of Brooke's immaculate surfaces. Like an interior of a room dimly glimpsed through reflective glass on a bright day, we find unsuspected depths and complexities. This insistence on multiple and contradictory spaces within her paintings - of reflection, perspective and depth on the one hand, flatness and the beautiful materiality of her paint and canvas on the other is born of her contemplation of perception and the nature of painting itself, which can carry and reconcile all these contradictions within it."

Tim Maguire.