ON VIEW

A leading figure in New Hampshire's studio furniture movement, Jon Brooks is highly regarded for his ability to combine craftsmanship, inventiveness, and poetic whimsy. Born in 1944 in Manchester, New Hampshire, Brooks earned the degrees of BFA and MFA at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. In 1970 he commenced teaching at St. Anselm's College in his native city. Since then, he has taught and lectured widely, filling posts at institutions as varied as the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, the University of Tasmania, and the Haystack School of Crafts in Maine. Brooks has maintained close ties to New Hampshire, and between 1990 and 1999 he won three fellowships from the State Council on the Arts. Examples of his work may be found in state, national, and international collections, including the Currier Museum of Art, the New Hampshire Historical Society, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, the American Craft Museum in New York City and the Queen Victoria Museum in Launceston, Tasmania.

Brooks regards True Loves Blue as one of his best pieces. Made of maple and painted in bold colors of blue and black, the small settee features two standing figures that serve as supports for the flowing forms of the seat and back. Reminiscent of children's drawings, the androgynous, sticklike figures turn their heads to regard the viewer as they extend their free arms in a seeming invitation to sit. Whimsical at first glance, Brooks's composition is also lyrical and somewhat mysterious in its use of dark colors and fanciful carved hieroglyphs. The squiggly marks that cover the bodies of the figures are evocative of tribal tattoos, ritual, and magic. Indeed, in what may be a form of visual alchemy, they reflect and complement the natural maple grain that emerges through the painted surfaces of the settee's seat and back. Effectively unifying human and wooden forms, True Loves Blue essays a poetic statement that goes beyond simple good humor.

True Loves Blue belongs to a group of several related pieces made between 1995 and 2000 in which two figures support either a seat or a tabletop. Brooks began incorporating figurative elements in his furniture designs about 1990. Building on the attenuated, sticklike compositions of pieces from the 1980s such as the Currier's pair of Styx Ladderback Chairs (1986), Brooks introduced animal and human forms, resulting in sculptural hybrids such as the whimsical dogs Alfred and Georgia (both 1991), also in the Museum's collection.

The Currier Museum of Art has maintained a consistent interest in Brooks's career, and in addition to True Loves Blue, Alfred, Georgia, and the Styx Ladderback Chairs, it also possesses an early and unusual table (1969) in which a natural branch form is paired with a sheet of blue Plexiglas. The Currier purchased True Loves Blue at the Fifth Annual New Hampshire Furniture Masters Auction, held on September 3, 2000, at the historic Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire's White Mountains. Today, it occupies an important place in the Museum's growing collection of contemporary New Hampshire studio furniture.

VSD

REFERENCES

Three Centuries of New Hampshire Furniture Making. Auction cat., New Hampshire Furniture Masters Association, n.p., 2000.

Notes contained in object file, The Currier Museum of Art.