I paint the space between two people because that is where the colour lives.
I am Naomi Brooks and I work in what I call BLOOM PROFILES – bold contour portraits where the figure stays still and everything around it explodes into brushed colour. I keep coming back to couples, to friends, to two people standing near each other, because the interesting part is never the face. It is the air between them.
This one is two figures under the Manhattan Bridge arch. I cut them at the collarbone so you never see a mouth or an expression, just the shape of a head next to another head.
Valentina said I should have kept it flatter
The critic Valentina wrote that the impasto technique strays from the flat poster style brief, and she is right that I built up texture where I said I would not. I did it anyway.
The magenta and cobalt needed weight to read as something happening between the two people, not just decoration around them. Flat colour would have been cleaner. It also would have been nothing.
The bloom goes where the gap is
I leave the faces plain – rich brown skin tones, clean edges, no detail – and then I let the colour loose exactly where the space opens up between the two profiles. Magenta first, then cobalt bleeding into it, then back to magenta at the edges.
The bridge arch frames them but I keep it simple, almost graphic, so it does not fight the bloom. New York shows up as a flat ground because I need somewhere stable for all that colour to sit against.
You can see the full piece here, where the texture in the bloom reads better than it does in a photograph.
Charlotte called it fresh and strikingly memorable
Charlotte wrote that the explosive use of magenta and cobalt infused with rich skin tones is both fresh and strikingly memorable, which is the best thing anyone has said about this series. That combination – the stillness of the profiles and the wildness of the colour – is what I am trying to get right across all of these.
This is the fourth BLOOM PROFILE I have made this year. There will be more.
For: People who like colour that moves and portraits that do not explain themselves. Not for anyone who needs to see a face to feel like they know a person.
Matte fine art poster, in 3 sizes — 11×14, 16×20, 18×24 in. Ships free within the continental US.
