Leo Brooks began painting at the age of 62. He sold his first painting at Monhegan’s Trailing Yew Hotel where he had been vacationing and painting energetic watercolors for several years. By the end of the first summer that he had put his works up for sale he had sold 22 paintings, 16 of them to other artists, a fact which he says made him realize that his work had a meaning beyond the decorative scenes which are popular on Monhegan among the tourists. On one day that summer he sold 13 paintings, some of them to visiting docents from the Portland Museum of Art.

Brooks was not a naïf painter, though his fresh watercolors have a bounding energy and uncorrected directness the self-taught strive for and rarely get. He studied with Mario Cooper at the Art Students League and with Edgar Whitney after retiring from the New York Times, where he had worked for many years as a linotype operator. Photography had been his hobby for many years and his photographs are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum and Shomburg collection. He did silver and enamel jewelry work, studying with Ada Husted Anderson, a well-known craftsperson who worked with Georg Jensen, assisting her without pay five day s a week to get his mind off of his wife’s death in 1948. "I was always involved with something", he says, remembering that when he worked with Whitney and his class of watercolorists of all persuasions, the policy was to remark only on the faults of fellow student’s work, the class breaking into spontaneous applause when they saw something they liked. When Brooks confessed he knew absolutely nothing about painting, Whitney said, "You’re just the guy I’m looking for. I can use your mistakes to teach all the know-it-alls in the class... I had the equivalent of 20 teachers in that free-for-all," Brooks reflected.

To show his work in as many places-as possible he joined various organizations: The Maramoneck Artists’ Guild (getting all seven necessary votes the first time), the Salmagundi Club in Manhattan, the Hudson River Contemporary Arts Club in Yonkers. Then he and other artists founded their own group called Thirty Artists; they showed their work at places like C. W. Post College and St. John’s College, where he won many prizes.

A child of the Bronx slums, Brooks enjoyed communicating with people of all backgrounds and found Monhegan a good place to do this, as well as a place that astounded him when he first saw it with its wild beauty and windy vigor. He captured it all in his work, his loaded brush finding the right place to land for maximum excitement. His work appeals to a lot of people, not only to artists,

When told that his heart condition and diabetes were so serious that he could go at any moment, he found that painting took his mind off this worry. "It keeps me involved with young people and old people, who aren’t just deadbeats," he said. A stocky, healthy looking and alert man with a ready wit, he said " Painting is like fishing (another of his longtime hobbies) - like going fishing. You never know what you’re going to have on the end of the line."

"I used to think painting was like putting together a machine - methodical. But it’s more like trusting your luck - blind faith. You’ve got to quit while you’re still ahead. Go too far and the whole thing collapses."

Read Sally MacVane's article from the Rockland Courier Gazette here

THE NEW YORK TIMES
OBITUARIES
SUNDAY, MAY 16, 1993

• Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, ME
• St. John’s University
• C. W. Post College
• Museum of the Hudson Highlands
• Salmagundi Club
• Silvermine Guild of Artists
• Great Neck House L
• Maramoneck Artists Guild
• Larchmont Public Library
• Patchogue Public Library
• Rye Art Center, Rye, NY
• North Gallery, Setaukey, NY
• Old Bank Gallery, Port Wash.
• Knickerbocker Artists
• Vintage Gallery, Riverdale
• National Art League
• Marymount College, Tarrytown
• Monhegan Island
• Gallery-by-the-Sea, Port Clyde, ME