Gemma Rose Brook
Painting by the dim glow of a headtorch or the distant radiance of the moon, Gemma Rose Brook’s nocturnal practice is as much an exercise in endurance as it is in observation. In the dark, colours are muted, edges blur, and forms are guessed at rather than grasped. “I’m fully immersed: covered in paint, my puffer and rain jacket nearly warm; my nose and painting hand tingling with the pain of the cold. Crouched over my plein air kit, I’m painting what I can just see and everything I feel within the nocturnal light,” Brook explains. Her works are not only studies of landscape but also documents of the physical and emotional experiences they demand of her.
The gestural urgency of Brook’s work reflects the conditions in which it is created: the freezing cold of South Australia’s midwinter, the blackness that obscures her surroundings. Tree trunks emerge as skeletal forms from dark voids; the moon pulses against a stormy sky; a salt lake reflects distorted silhouettes in the fading light of dusk.
In these works, Brook balances raw, gestural freedom with an intense perceptual focus, drawing us into landscapes that feel alive yet withholding. Much like Peter Booth’s winter scenes, her paintings resist easy entry. There are no roads or rivers to guide the gaze, only fractured forms and shadowy atmospheres that blur the line between figuration and abstraction.
Gemma Rose Brook’s achievements, ranging from accolades at the National Emerging Art Prize and the Fleurieu Biennale to residencies with Country Arts SA, cement her reputation as an artist working at the threshold of her craft. Brook’s landscapes, like the darkened skies under which they were created, hold us in a moment of contemplation. They remind us that the night, with its curtain of silence and unknowable depths, is not only a place of obscurity but also one of possibility.
