Born in Chicago in 1953, her parents students at the University of Chicago, Brooke early decided to become an artist. She studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago then changed her focus and studied Physics. Her love of Physics continues to this day where she applies the effects of Fluid Dynamics in her painting.
In 1972 she went to Vienna, Austria, where she attended the Art Academy. It was here that she came into contact with Viennese Actionism and the Material Actions in which paint is used as material. She lived and worked in Munich for several years and then moved to Portugal where she applied vibrant colors in her landscape painting.
In 2008 she moved to New York City where she worked with street artists under the name “Sprezanne”. Shortly thereafter she founded Radical Art Initiative, a collaboration of artists to create visuals for social and environmental actions in New York City. She worked with 350.org and other organizations with actions such as drawing the 2100 high water line on the sidewalk of Lower Manhattan with blue paint.
Being in numerous group shows in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side gave her the chance to exchange ideas with other artists and reinforced her certainty that the new direction in painting requires the unification of abstraction and figuration.
In 2011 she moved to Peekskill, just north of New York City. Here she was able to perfect her signature method of squirting paint directly from plastic bottles onto the canvas and then gently tilting it at an angle. This method allows the paint to swirl at will. Color elements combine to suggest a figurative situation.
In 2017 she published an art book, “The Waterdrinkers”, funded through Kickstarter.
In 2018 she moved to a remote area of Northern California.
She participated in residencies at the M.David Gallery in Brooklyn in 2019 and at the 18th St. Art Center in Los Angeles in 2022.
She was chosen for a solo booth at the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York in 2022 and in Los Angeles in 2022 and 2023.
