Brooke Harker is a contemporary artist based in Los Angeles, California. Her lively paintings of cities and coastal scenes are characterized by energetic brush strokes in ink and thick oil paint applied with palette knives. These vibrant depictions of daily life capture a sense of motion and highlight moments of synchronicity.
Harker calls herself a historian of the ordinary. Her paintings are a collaboration with all of the people who’ve contributed to a place over time: architects, engineers, and pedestrians whose colorful fashion landed in view at the perfect moment. All of their individual actions brought together one moment, fated to be captured on canvas.
Harker’s paintings live in collections all over the world, including with the Prince of Morocco in the Royal Palace in Rabat and as part of The Chase Center Art Collection in San Francisco, home to the Golden State Warriors. Her artworks are part of the cultural heritage collection of The U.S. Embassy Tokyo, Japan in collaboration with the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Art in Embassies. Her art also resides in numerous private collections of Hollywood creatives.
In 2022, Harker’s paintings exhibited at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and during the 2021 Olympics, debuted at The Chiba City Museum of Art in Japan as part of the 20th Japan International Art Exchange. Exhibit curators, Katsu Shimmin and Julienne Johnson, placed Harker’s art in The National Art Center of Tokyo, in 2019, with an Award of Excellence.
Harker’s solo exhibit, An Eclectic Perspective, painted on a several month residency on a farm in Paliano, Italy toured Italian galleries from 2015-19, including locations in Rome, Genoa and Frosinone, with curator Alfio Borghese of the noble Borghese family.
A selection of her artworks also appeared in numerous group exhibits and Bienales curated by Borghese in Italy and California since they first met at the Oceanside Museum of Art for the opening of California Dreaming: An International Portrait of Southern California. Borghese first featured Harker’s art in Italian press, in 2014 when he hosted the exhibit (juried by art critic Peter Frank & museum directors Daniel Foster and Drew Oberjuerg) at Palazzo della Provincia di Frosinone, Italy. It went on to tour to the Oceanside Museum of Art and the Riverside Museum of Art in California from through 2015.
Harker has exhibited in various galleries in Los Angeles and has been represented by Lu Martin Galleries in Laguna Beach, CA since 2014. She is a member of the International Association of Art USA and InterNations. She is one of the co-hosts of Saturday Night Live Art Shows, a project she started during the 2020 pandemic which encourages artists around the world to have art shows from home. She is a lifetime member of the Bundelkhand Art Society in Jhansi, India.
Fascinated by other cultures and languages since childhood, Harker has lived abroad and participated in projects and residencies throughout Europe and Asia. She continues to travel for inspiration, yet always returns home to Los Angeles to paint in an outdoor studio in the California sunshine.
Selected recent exhibits:
Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, The Chiba City Museum of Art, Japan, The National Art Center, Tokyo, Japan, The Chase Center, San Francisco, The Chiba City Museum of Art, Michael Hayden Art, Los Angeles, Castelli Art Space, Los Angeles, CA, Palazzo del Comune, Boville Erica, Italy, Cassels Al Barsha, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Area Contesa Arte, Rome, Italy, Gloria Delson Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles, Gabba Gallery, Los Angeles, Gallery 825, Los Angeles, Lu Martin Galleries, Laguna Beach, CA, Satura Art Gallery, Genoa, Italy, Villa Comunale di Frosinone, Italy, Riverside Museum of Art in Riverside CA, Fann-A-Porter Gallery in Dubai, Oceanside Museum of Art in Oceanside CA, FABStudio Art Gallery in Santa Monica, CA, Palazzo della Provincia di Frosinone, Italy, The Wolf Fine Art Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Malibleu Gallery in Malibu, CA, bg Bergamot Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.
artist Brooke Harker with “Where Hearts Reside” 56″ x 56″ ink, oil & acrylic on canvas
in The Chase Center Art Collection next to Suite 19 in the Oracle Suites
made possible by Sports and The Arts, The Chase Center and Adobe.
Selected Press & Recognition: Artillery Magazine, American Art Collector, Art in America, ChicStyle, Italy, ExtraTV, Italy, The Huffington Post, The Hollywood Times, The Malibu Times, La Provincia- (Frosinone, Italy), le3.it, The Santa Monica Mirror, Splash Magazines, The Examiner, Topanga Messenger, Santa Monica Daily Press, Westside Today, The Los Angeles Post, Dongguan Informer (China), and cited in More Magazine & Felix Magazine, Buzzfeed, Season 8 of Hell’s Kitchen on FOX, & nominated in 2013 by the Field Deputy of CA State Senator Alex Padilla for Excellence in the Arts.
Click here to see more event photos
Artist Statement: The paintings I create are about connections between people. Within the hustle of any city or relaxing coastal scene there is a silent cooperation between people, whether to negotiate their paths on a sidewalk or in the selection of where to place umbrellas in the sand. I’m fascinated by the idea that a moment exists only once and will never occur again. It amazes me how the lives of many people throughout history contribute to the current moment and a person’s minor choices have the ability to impact infinite people throughout time. In some ways, my paintings are time capsules, and I’m a historian of the ordinary.
It becomes a bit of a hunt for me when taking photos or sketching live on location to find moments of unknowing collaboration between strangers. I track the stride of pedestrians, the flow of traffic and the position of the sun in illuminating these interactions. This fascination with synchronicity reflects in the compositions I choose. I sort for pops of color that relate to each other in the same moment. When a pedestrian’s pants match a nearby taxi or a bus coordinates with the traffic light it brightens my day. These seemingly insignificant observations ignite a sense of wonder about the way everything in life fits together. As most people don’t want to hear how excited I am to see a grocery bag match a street sign, I let the joy fuel my art.
As I associate places and people with color, the drippy acrylic backgrounds represent the energy of a place. The ink strokes, whether fluid or defined, mirror the structured world we live in and are a place to tame the wanderings of the mind. The pure colors in thick oil paint texture applied with knives express a desire to feel a sense of flow in life. The stories of many people I’ve met and learned from along the way are layered into the process of creating these scenes. Painting allows me to share my life visibly and are private journal entries at the same time. The lessons I learn in life embed in the paint and help transform my perspective and experiences. I believe that as each person connects to themselves and heals, there is a potential for the thread of our impact to open this world up to more compassion, understanding and love.
 painting in Matera, Italy |
 taking photos in Havana, Cuba |
Brooke Harker’s approach to the image of a city – of any environment, actually, but a city’s most particularly – insists that our experience of a place emerges from a wealth of phenomena, smaller and larger, interacting and giving one another a reason to exist. Harker’s method, reliant equally on drawing and painting throughout even the most painterly tableau, does not simply thrust us into the middle of a bustling street; it dissolves the street and reassembles it around our vision, as if we had been dreaming, been jolted awake, and found ourselves beholding a scene at once instantly recognizable and entirely alien.
– Peter Frank- art critic for The Huffington Post, associate editor Fabrik Magazine
Brooke Harker illustrates with her meticulous descriptive art the continuous movement of a metropolis and the incessant flow of its tumultuous traffic in the city of cinema, Los Angeles, where Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Venice, Culver City, Malibu, The Arts District, Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Bangladesh, Thai Town, Little Ethiopia, Mexico and Little Tokyo all coexist- in short, where you can find the whole world.
-Alfio Borghese- curator & arts journalist, Rome, Italy
On the map of her canvases, Brooke Harker pictures the land she imagines with her portrayal of hope; it is the city of the sun we yearn for.
– Marcello Carlino- art critic, Rome, Italy
See this 3 minute film about the Harker’s paintings below.
