Suzanne Brooker
"Suzanne's Atelier had a profound effect on me in many ways. Suzanne's weekly exercises of articulating responses to questions about art and painting got me started on understanding what art and painting mean to me personally. Technically, she taught ways of seeing and drawing that helped me greatly in self-directed study. Suzanne has been a generous teacher who shows a real interest in my articulating my own sensibilities."
— Sheila Siden, Student
Brooker is a gifted and powerful draughtsperson, painter and teacher whose training in art history, art theory, color theory and critical dialogue make for a knowledgeable and articulate teaching style. She brings great passion to her instruction and aims to promote within the student an aesthetic intelligence through a series of learning phases that includes perceptual training, technique, historical awareness and critical analysis. She received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study program in New York City.
After returning to the West Coast, she studied with Gary Faigin at what was then the Seattle Academy of Fine Art. She went on to pursue her MFA in figurative drawing at California State University at Long Beach. There she studied under Domenic Cretara and honed her teaching skills. She has shown in various galleries in New York, California and Washington.
This year for the first time we are offering a Portrait Painting Atelier with Suzanne Brooker.
Monday - Friday: 21 hour/week studio commitment
September 13 - June 24 [35 weeks]
AT1012: 2010-2011 annual tuition: $4,575
To view additional work by this artist, please visit www.suzannebrooker.com. Also be sure to check out her new book, Portrait Painting Atelier: Old Master Techniques and Contemporary Applications.
Artist's Statement
My passion for the visual world and the pursuit of images has motivated my work as an artist to create compelling images that sustain the viewer’s gaze. This presents an incredible challenge, between the wealth of art history and the flood of electronic media, to find the unique vision within the artist’s perception. My approach to teaching tries to uncover this aesthetic awareness in students. How to think as artist is as important as building the necessary skills to convey their individual response to the motif. Trained in an environment of conceptualism and critical theory has played an important part in how I approach teaching. I like to stress the idea of intension in the work:, asking “what am I trying to say?”, as a means for determining how to approach the subject. This is why developing a “style” is less important to me than discovering and developing ones temperament as an artist. And although my teaching is more concept-driven than technique-oriented, every student receives the foundation of studio practices, color-mixing strategies and paint application in order to best promote their ideas in the work.
My passion for the visual world and the pursuit of images has motivated my work as an artist to create compelling images that sustain the viewer’s gaze. This presents an incredible challenge, between the wealth of art history and the flood of electronic media, to find the unique vision within the artist’s perception. My approach to teaching tries to uncover this aesthetic awareness in students. How to think as artist is as important as building the necessary skills to convey their individual response to the motif. Trained in an environment of conceptualism and critical theory has played an important part in how I approach teaching. I like to stress the idea of intension in the work:, asking “what am I trying to say?”, as a means for determining how to approach the subject. This is why developing a “style” is less important to me than discovering and developing ones temperament as an artist. And although my teaching is more concept-driven than technique-oriented, every student receives the foundation of studio practices, color-mixing strategies and paint application in order to best promote their ideas in the work.