Synkroniciti is stoked to welcome Houstonian visual artist (and poet) Brooke Summers-Perry with two rich and evocative abstract paintings. Persist, formerly titled love anyway, is a circling, vibrant pattern of blue, blue-green and pink with highlights and lowlights. It has storm connotations due to the presence of lightning-like marks, but it also resembles a hollowed out or torn place spilling out light. I’m put in mind of Rumi, “The wound is the place where the Light enters you,” but it is difficult to tell whether this light comes from within or without (as it often is in matters of the subconscious). The electricity of the piece feels like a disturbed aura, and Brooke tells us “It is brutal out here, walking around with a big open heart.” She has used acrylic and oil pastel, which creates a contrast of texture between the creaminess and soft blendability of the pastels and the acrylic’s bold versatility and layerability. This makes an exciting combination and creates motion. The second painting, Boundaries, a finalist for our “Haunting” cover, is an abstract landscape principally rendered in blues, pinks, purples, blacks and greys. We have a sense of sky, perhaps a moon, land, and some structures of unusual shape and quality. It’s acrylic and Brooke has used a wash which drips in places, creating a haunting, weeping quality that is quite striking. “This painting pays respect to my Oneida ancestors and is a symbol of grief for all the ways we divide Mother Earth.”
View Brooke’s expressive paintings in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, Vol. 6, No. 4, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Brooke Summers-Perry is a painter, poet, coach, facilitator and community leader. She creates moody and mysterious mixed media pieces. Her work is as much a spiritual practice as it is a creative writing and a visual arts practice. Curating colors and images from meditations and pairing them with harvested words and phrases from Lectio Divina and blackout poetry, she works on paper, canvas, and digitally. Her practice has given her insights and an outlet for her intense longings for unity and wholeness. She considers her work successful when it invites viewers to pause and consider their own questions and longings.