PORTFOLIO

Recent work ranges from the monumental gouache on paper paintings of the Pencil series, to the modest, highly detailed scratchboards of the Pilgrims. The Wayfarer suite of prints combine computer illustration techniques with a playful take on the found object.

Scratchboards

From a review of the Spring Solos series of exhibits at Arlington Art Center:

...one may prove worth the trek: Brooke Rogers's scratchboard drawings are highly detailed chronicles of "Pilgrim," a recurring character with a curious look: S/he amounts to a pair of bulging eyeballs and a bald head peeking out from a body that's wrapped, mummylike, to an army stretcher. In a series of ink drawings that encircle small-scale, Trajanlike columns...Pilgrim connotes anxiety, helplessness and the Simpsons.

– from "The Perils of Pilgrim," by Jessica Dawson
The Washington Post, April 15, 2006

Pencil Paintings

The common yellow pencil serves in these works as a metaphor for creation. The poet writes with it, the artist sketches with it. Twisted and curling, looping and leaping, the work of creation is a muscular and robust activity.

Art Historian Ursula Ehrhardt, in a catalog essay accompany the artist's debut New York solo exhibition in 2005, wrote:

A familiar, common object, the pencil is associated with both writing and drawing, as well as art-making in general. It is used to form both words and images which, in turn, can be related to language and art, understood as different signifying systems that structure how we view and represent reality.

Wayfarer Prints

The Wayfarer prints are cryptic. The text often refers to characters or lines from classic movies, sometimes lines from popular music of the 1930s or 40s. Other bits of text are poem fragments that suggest the quest, (sometimes frustrated), for love – both spiritual and romantic.

In old songs like “You Belong to Me” or “Our Love is Here to Stay”, the pyramids are symbolic of the permanence of romantic attachment. They also, along with the ‘Wayfarer’ sunglasses, (namesake of this suite of prints), suggest the glamour of travel to an exotic locale. But it is a journey, more than a holiday. It is a pilgrimage or quest.

The swordpicks, while serving to describe the surfaces of the prints by means of their cast shadows, suggest the power of words – sometimes to cut like a weapon, other times to prick the heart, as in love.