Jason Brooks is an Austin, Texas based artist who has also been working professionally as an accomplished tattoo artist since 1992. Throughout his career, Brooks has been recognized for his unique style of contemporary tattooing. In 2011, he became the first living tattoo artist to have a solo museum exhibition, held at Dallas Contemporary. Since 2011, he has shifted his focus to painting and has amassed a prolific body of work. Brooks paintings unfold themselves through a melting pot process and excavation of paint. His vocabulary has evolved to different forms and figurations that have repeatedly shown themselves after this process, as in the painting “Fire Feeders, The Burning Garden” 2023. One of the favorite forms has proven to be the gorilla. The gorilla reveals itself more as an emblem, rather than naturalistic. They appear in exaggerated scenarios, dominating the picture plane with their monolithic body mass, against fields of color, as in the painting “Night Club” 2023. This past year, Brooks revisited landscape painting from memory. This small body of work collaged together life experiences from his travels and places lived, embellishing them to a fantastical state, as in the painting “Day Dreamer” 2023.
