Kerry Brooks grew up in Wisconsin.  As a child, she played with Barbie dolls and remembers her childhood home being decorated with floral wallpaper that was prevalent in the 1980s. Those facts, coupled with her grandmother owning a dress shop and her desire to add beauty to the world, led Kerry Brooks to focus on female portraits encircled by bursts of floral bouquets.  She cites Gustav Klimt as one of her great influences.

 

Her process involves taking hundreds of photographs of models, and then sifting through them to find the ones that speak to her.  From these photographs Kerry Brooks then creates a look that is not of a certain time or place.  On the contrary, she creates a universalized view that stresses her subject’s inner beauty and the inner beauty that we all share and can relate to in ourselves and in the people we know and love.  

 

Kerry Brooks passion for art led her to study painting at the Academy of Fine Art in Kiev, Ukraine, the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the New York Academy of Art, where she was able to enrich her work through a rigorous study of anatomy and classical techniques.  Kerry has been working as a fine artist since 2003.  She works in a variety of media and techniques, including graphite, colored pencil, charcoal, and oil.  She is committed to the long-standing tradition of tightly controlled draftsmanship and technical proficiency.  Her work is collected nationally and internationally and has been shown in a number of galleries and shows throughout the United States. Simmons lives and works in New York City.