Kelsey Brookes

Kelsey Brookes lives in San Diego, California where the weather is "is a perfectly boring 75 and sunny."  But don't call it Cali.  "Cali is what comes out of your mouth if you are Fred Durst or at least a Fred Durst look-alike."
But, besides the weather and nicknames for California, we talked about other things as well, things like Kelsey's paintings.


When did you first start painting?

The first painting I ever did was my senior year of college (2000) about six years ago now…damn I’m getting old. It was this Basquiat rip off.  I wanted shit to hang on my walls but didn’t have the money for real art so I thought I would just try my hand at painting and recreate the stuff I liked. Then that was it... I didn’t really paint again until about four years ago.  I took this surf trip all around the South Pacific for a year or so after college and ended up in LA with no cash but a head and journal full of imagery.  I got a 9 to 5 job in San Diego (in the research department of a local Biotech company), moved down and started painting on a semi regular basis at that point.  I just recently quit that job and am now full on painting every day… been about a year now.

Kids? Someday? Two dozen? Never?

Man, don’t freak me out… I can barely support myself at the moment.  Since I quit my job I have become super freaked and semi paranoid about my girlfriend and her birth control pills.  I started reminding here every night to take that shit.  I know it sounds all control freak and shit but a kid would totally kill my fledgling career.  This art thing is like having 20 kids all at once… well maybe not that gnarly but it really is all I can think about at the moment and I have a feeling that is what it’s going to take to make it.  That said… Yes, even in the face of all this talk about over-population I still would like to have a few kids… but just not now.  My grandfather once told me you have to have kids if you are going to have a full human experience… he was a smart man.

Are you a hippie? I mean, I really like the airbrushing in your work, especially the tie-dye/cobra painting…

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Naw… no hippie here.  Though I do think hippies are pretty cool… Speaking of hippies, what in the hell happened to our parents?  My parents along with all of their friends were hippies back in the day. They were all preaching love and peace and all that hippie crap, which is pretty cool I suppose… but what happened to that mentality?  All the old folks I see now days are just like all the oldies that have ever come: wrinkly and angry and rich.  What I’m saying is that I don’t see a continuity of hippie consciousness running from the 60’s until now in anything but more and more crappy jam bands.  It’s like no matter how cool you were as a kid you end up just like every one else in the end… pissed off.  But as for me, naw, I like fluoride in my toothpaste way too much to ever be a hippie. I am getting into eastern folk imagery and am trying to bring that into my art a lot… so that is a very legitimate question. I can see the comparison.

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Paintings are ten times better than illustrations. True or false?

No way… I have seen some illustrations that fucking rock. Just yesterday I saw this chick's stuff on fecalface.com  Aurel Schmidt was her name, and her illustrations were tight as shit.  You could never take anything away from her stuff just because they were illustrations. I suppose though if you look at the big picture, paintings are generally sold for more money, so I suppose you would have to argue that they are “worth” more to the general art market.  But for me illustrations are just as rad as paintings.

When you’re not working, what are you doing? And don’t say sleeping.

Mostly surfing and skating.  I suck at both so don’t get any ideas… just for fun. Surfing really is the most perfect sport though…huge fan of surfing. Skating started as something to do when the surf was flat but has started to take on a life of it’s own recently. It just hurts so much more when you fall.

Is there a trend happening now? Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that artists are implicating more and more forms of animalistic sacrilege in their work.

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Animals do now and have always played a huge part in my work.  I love animals.  A byproduct of being raised on a healthy dose of The Discovery Channel and National Geographic.  I just love drawing and more recently actually painting animals.  I feel like I can be loose and relaxed when I draw an animal, when I draw people I am constalntly adjusting the image.  It kinda makes sense though.  Humans are such socially involved creatures… we are constantly reading each others faces for very subtle social clues and insight into other people's emotional states.  Basically we all are the world's toughest critics when it comes to human faces and bodies… speaking strictly from a realistic perspective. Obviously this holds no water when your speaking of abstraction.  When animals are involved we are in foreign territory.  It’s way harder to notice if a panda bears ears are in the wrong place or if a sharks teeth are the wrong color.  That frees me up to get loose with my art and try out new stuff and that’s when paintings look good to me… when they are loose and effortless looking.

Website

http://www.kelseybrookes.com

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