Moe Brooker
The Substance of Feeling
Lithograph on Rives BFK paper
11 plates/runs 14 colors
22 x 22"
Edition of 20

Moe Brooker has created a signed and numbered print to benefit the DCCA. It is for sale through the museum retail space, Alternatives.  The price is $750, unframed, $675 for DCCA Members.  A certificate will accompany the print along with a brief essay by DCCA adjunct curator, J. Susan Isaacs.

Moe Brooker (Philadelphia, PA) creates abstract paintings with rhythmic patterns and layered, colorful surfaces that reflect his positive and life affirming view of the world.  He claims that his most significant inspiration comes from Wassily Kandinsky, the early twentieth-century Russian abstract painter and author of the still influential 1912 book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Brooker refers to the “unspeakable joy” of life, of an all embracing and optimistic outlook toward God, humankind, and the universe, values he states that he acquired from his parents and his grandmother.  With this in mind, he signs the letters TTGG (To the Glory of God) at the bottom of his paintings.  He is committed to a spiritual approach to art, believing that painting is an expression of great joy. He also is quite musical, singing in the choir at the First African Baptist Church of Philadelphia and with the Royal Priesthood, a gospel group with a jazz orientation.  This too emerges in his paintings, in the patterns, beats, and pulsations of his colors and forms.

Brooker comments about his recent work, “Jazz is still a source of information and inspiration, but differently.  In my earlier work the use of line was like a lilting melody; the work is now more like a series of melodies and chords.”

Brooker is also interested in mark-making and in that way his works recall those by artists such as Mark Tobey and Cy Twombly.  Brooker understands the elegance of drawing and the complexity of making simple marks on a white sheet of paper or across the canvas.  These marks literally dance across the surface, suggesting musical notation, especially in such formats as the shaped notes most commonly used in congregational singing.  Of course, Brooker works abstractly, and all of these are suggestive rather than literal sources.  His paintings imply at times a kind of free-form calligraphy along with a love of expressive color and the play of contrasting textures.  In Point and Line to Plane, a book well-loved by Brooker, Kandinsky writes about the exact function of the basic components of composition: point, line, and plane. Kandinsky discusses the elements that he believes compose every painting: the point, the line, and the material support for the paint that he calls the basic plane. For him, a point is not just a point, but a temporal presence, even a sound. Through Kandinsky’s analysis of mark-making and composition he provides insights into the creative process, and it is both his analysis of the process of making art and the thought process of being an artist that stimulate Brooker in his own artistic investigations.

Moe Brooker holds BFA and MFA degrees from Tyler School of Fine Art at Temple University in Philadelphia; he also earned a certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  He teaches and is the Head of Basics at the Moore College of Art and Design, the oldest women’s art school in the United States.  He has been awarded a number of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in Visual Arts, and his work is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, NY; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; and The Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA. Brooker is represented by the Sande Webster Gallery, Philadelphia and the June Kelly Gallery, New York.