Super Natural

by Gwendolyn Lehman

I suppose if I wanted to be fatuous or trite, I would begin by saying Paintings in the Woods was a magical experience, but I know magic was never involved. Paintings this good are meticulously conceived and planned and executed. They are a labor not only of love, but of intense artistry and technical skill. According to the artist, Brooke Rogers, the paintings were conceived for the space in which he hung them - a clearing in a woods at the end of a mildly rutted path strewn with leaves, pine shards, and forest-y things. You had to walk a ways before first seeing the art. And then, it surprised you. It was not resting on easels but hanging from trees.

The canvases were shaped into circles, triangles, squares, rectangles. They hung from tall trees whose trunks, I like to imagine, received them in the spirit in which they were offered. There is geometry at work here, and I felt a beginning awareness in me who hates math why I was made to study it in tenth grade.

There were quite a lot of people who attended that evening, old and young. The weather was ideal, clear and fair, warm for November. There was no need to bundle up, no need to hurry along the path past toppled trees to see a painting that had caught your eye. You could take your time, stay until dark when the spotlights mounted on upper branches made the paintings start to glow. I was glad we had no reason to leave before the sun set.

I had my favorites that night. I showed a photo I had taken of one of those favorites, Invisible Scene, to my step-daughter. “Oh, that’s based on fractals,” she said, “you know, where similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales?” I didn’t know, to be honest. It was math again and fractals is one of those terms that has to be repeatedly explained to me in progressively simpler terms.

Forest Eyelet looked as if it was made of wood, though I knew it was not. Layers of paint, some poured in delicate colors formed translucent ribbons of light that became the image of branching, slender trunks of trees dusted with starlight. To be sure, Forest Eyelet did feel magical that night, as did the painting American Coverlet, that momentarily tricked my eye into believing the trunk of the tree on which it was displayed ran right through the painting itself.

I looked long at Brooke’s painting Bark that night, one of the first paintings I saw as we walked the path and approached the art. He can, with paint and a brush and whatever other tools he chooses to use, create layered images that tease you with textures, the repetition of shape, the subtlety of color, into believing for a moment that we are not the enemies of nature, but a part of it; not the best part, just a part. It was an evening to help us understand that all nature, including us, is part of a pattern that when stitched together makes a world. Brooke created for friends and family, fellow artists, art lovers, and me, an old high school teacher of his, a one-of-a-kind experience, a rare evening where art blended with the woods and the night and the musical sounds, both created and natural, giving those of us who were there an opportunity to see the work of a man who is an artist of the first order.