Western Morning News (Saturday)
Looking down on landscapes from a height
Frank Ruhrmund admires Nina Brooke’s overhead studies of beach and surf culture
There can’t be many artists who, as well using such items as paint and brush, palette, sketchbook and easel, employ a drone – the remote controlled pilotless aircraft and not the non-working male of the honey bee – when working, but this is just what Nina Brooke does.
A surfer and traveller as well as painter who was born in Rock, her formative years were shared between Cornwall and Curacao, the largest island of the Netherlands Antilles in the Caribbean, that many will be familiar with for the liqueur of spirits it produces. A West Indian island which also happens to be the native land of her mother, who along with her father, encouraged her at an early age in her enthusiasm for art. Both parents were mariners and as a baby she sailed across the Atlantic with them at the helm of their boat. Little wonder then that her paintings would reflect her ever evolving obsession with the ocean. Such was her parents’ encouragement that soon after completing her A-levels, she was showing her work in a Cork Street gallery in London, alongside such luminaries as Lucien Freud and Howard Hodgkin, which was followed by a period of studying at Oxford Brookes and Falmouth School of Art, plus Newlyn School of Art where she acknowledges that under some of Cornwall’s finest artists she learned the art and importance of gesture, colour and textural abstraction. All of which, as well as travelling widely from Sri Lanka to Costa Rica and the east coast of the USA, she has put into practice and gained a considerable reputation for her studies of beach and surf culture.
Then, some five or six years ago, it quite literally took off – pardon the pun – when she added an aerial dimension to it looking at the landscape from helicopter and drone. While her journeys abroad have defined much of her practice, she has always returned home to her studio at Rock, and it is there since the start of Covid-19 that she been looking closely at the topography of her home and its surroundings. In recent months, with the help of her drone, she has been been exploring west Cornwall, and has come up with a collection of works that should perhaps carry a cautionary for viewers subject to vertigo, but is simply stunning. Her exhibition is accompanied by an equally splendid show by the potter Lauren Nauman, who studied at the Royal College of Art. Renowned for her traditional technique, and the slip casting
that is central to her practice, and her process of mould making and casting with clay which informs her designs, her ceramics are exceptional and, like the paintings of Nina Brooke, should not be missed.
Admission is free, and both shows can be seen in the New Craftsman gallery, 24 Fore Street, St Ives, until September 4.