Known for his surrealistic portraits of women with stretched oval faces and simplified features, Toronto-based self-taught artist, Troy Brooks said about his characteristic work: “One thing that used to drive me crazy was that I always made the faces too long. It was something I used to have to go back and fix in my drawings. When I began creating my own characters I decided to just accentuate it,” Brooks says.
“The women in my paintings were confrontational and in charge. They had access to everything I felt was out of reach for me. They faced my fears in cryptic tableaux and conquered,” he says. Their androgyny implies their uncompromised sexual identity, where the woman is creating chaos and embracing it with courage, in Brooks words, “completely visible and not backing down.”
