• Frank Leonard Brooks was a Canadian artist best known for his watercolour landscapes, abstract collages, and adventurous life as an...

    Leonard Brooks in his studio.

    Frank Leonard Brooks was a Canadian artist best known for his watercolour landscapes, abstract collages, and adventurous life as an expat living in Mexico. 
     
    Born in London, Brooks arrived in Canada in 1912. He took night classes at the Central Technical School at the Ontario College of Art but was otherwise largely self-taught. In 1939 he became an associate member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
     
    Brooks served as a war artist during World War II. Following the war he received a grant from the Department of Veterans Affairs to study art in Mexico. 
     
  • In 1947 Brooks and his wife, Reva, moved to San Miguel de Allende, a colonial-era city in central Mexico, just...
    Leonard and Reva climb the cobblestone street to their hillside rental home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, 1948.
    Originally published in John Virtue's Leonard and Reva Brooks: Artists in Exile in San Miguel de Allende, 2001.
    In 1947 Brooks and his wife, Reva, moved to San Miguel de Allende, a colonial-era city in central Mexico, just outside the nation's capital. They had initially planned to live there for one year but stayed for over half a century. During this time, Brooks drew inspiration from his surrounding environment and shaped the city's vibrant cultural scene. In San Miguel Brooks played violin and taught music, wrote artist books, made tapestries and formed lifelong friendships. Although he and Reva travelled to other parts of the world and maintained connections to Canadian galleries, it was in San Miguel that Brooks felt recognized as an artist, and it was there that he developed his unique visual language in collage. 
  • Over the course of his decades-long career, Brooks's art transitioned from figurative and landscape paintings to abstract works and mixed...
    Frank Leonard Brooks, For Reva, Collage on canvas, 31.5 x 27.5" in, 2003. © The Estate of Frank Leonard Brooks
    Over the course of his decades-long career, Brooks's art transitioned from figurative and landscape paintings to abstract works and mixed media collages. 
     
    Brooks began to experiment with collage while visiting Paris in 1961. Years later, he wrote, "I have developed an acrylic collage medium that has become my favourite form of expression and is as natural to me as a painting device as oil or watercolour that I still love to do." By then he had developed a habit of collecting diverse materials for his collages, including old newspapers, posters, sheet music, letters, account ledgers, pieces of fabric and egg cartons, among other items. This process of collecting and collaging materials from his surrounding environments led critics to consider each collage a sort of abstract visual journal. Brooks's collages commanded years of his attention, and became, over time, some of the most widely celebrated works in his oeuvre. 
     
    Today Brooks's artworks are held in numerous public galleries, including the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City.