Location: United States
Brooke Metcalfe has had a passion for art ever since she was a small child. She spent many hours in her youth sketching the faces of her friends and family. At 16 she traveled over 3000 miles away from her home to begin formal studies in art in the United Kingdom at Byam Shaw School of Art and Richmond University London.
Each of the paintings in this portfolio were created within 24 hours as part of the Call and Response project put on by Shoebox PR. I was paired with another artist, each artist having 24 hours only to create a response piece to the other artist's work. I was paired with Brooklyn poet Kate Lutzner. The paintings are a reaction to her poems, as her poems where a reaction to my previous painting. The themes revolved around traumas and regrets experienced by women.
This piece was the first piece in the series. I had had this image of an ancient Celtic symbol of a labyrinth superimposed on a woman's stomach. I was thinking about how this particular part of a woman's anatomy defines so many of the major events in a woman's life and the twists and turns those events lead her on. This is an oil painting 36 x 24 inches.
This is an oil painting 36 x 24 inches that depicts a mother and child in silhouette at a window. The child is desperate to get the mother's attention but the mother is either oblivious or too concerned with what is going on outside. She is a narcissist. I've heard other's perspectives on this who see it as a mother protecting her child in the outside world, particularly in this day and age as we are going through the coronavirus pandemic. I can see how it could read that way and I'm always open to the interpretation of others but my intent was show a callous neglect.
Oil Painting 36 x 24 inches. This painting speaks to how women all too often give their hearts away to people who don't truly care for them. Often they realise that what they are doing is harmful to themselves but they willingly tear themselves apart and do it again and again.
Oil Painting 48 x 24 As I only had a 24 period to paint this I'm planning to redo this painting on a much larger scale. Something in the poem my partner had written reminded me of Edith Eger had written in her book The Choice, her story of surviving the Holocaust. In the moment that she thought she was dying and had been abandoned to die on a pile of already dead bodies she heard American soldiers arrive and she found just enough strength to reach out one more time and let them know she was alive. It was so deeply moving. There's always a way to keep going even in the most dire of circumstances. Even when it feels easier to die and death seems to be pulling on you to let go.
As a child I was always told by my immediate family members that I was overreacting or being too sensitive pretty much any time I had any type of emotional response to anything that happened. I learned pretty quickly to suppress my emotions to just about everything. Eventually I had a therapist say to me "You do know it's ok to feel things right?" I spent so long not allowing myself to feel that her simple statement was a huge eye opener for me. I started thinking about how maybe my emotions and sensitivity weren't a downfall in my personality, maybe they were exactly what I needed in order to create.
Oil on canvas 36 x 24 inches. This painting speaks to the rage I have had bottled up inside for so many years. Decades of being put down and held back and mistreated. I specifically went for an unappealing and vintage looking colour palate. This isn't meant to be a pretty picture.
Oil on canvas 36 x 18 This is a painting of a woman in a resigned stage of grief. She knows and accepts the tramua she has been through but still the sorrow is overwhelming. All the brush strokes where made by pulling down with the brush to get that feeling of being pulled down into despair. The left half of her face is featureless and dissolving into the paint as she melts into her own world of grief.
“The Labyrinth”
“See Me”
“A Woman's Heart”
“Hope”
“Rage”
“Dissolve”
