Jason Brooks (b. 1972) is an Austin Texas-based artist who has been working professionally as an accomplished tattoo artist since 1992. Throughout his career, Brooks has been recognized internationally for his unique style of contemporary tattooing. In 2011, he became one of the only living tattoo artists to have a solo museum exhibition, held at the Dallas Contemporary. Since 2011, he has shifted his focus to painting and has amassed a prolific and idiosyncratic body of work. Brooks' paintings bring elements of the natural world in sync with capacities of the human mind. These may be through the use of perceptual anomalies, figurative mannerisms, or misplaced archetypes. Like a filmic still from the imagination, the work often presents a sense of isolation, unrest, or a paradoxical situation with no legible resolution. Many of the works are a found image through the excavation of paint.

My paintings are a collage of my life experiences. Not necessarily filmic stills, but a dissection of internal emotions. Extracted from complex emotions and experiences; simple, non-grandiose images appear. Most of my paintings do not have a set narrative, leaving it up to the viewer’s imagination to navigate their own path through the work.As an artist, I’m always looking for an opportunity to create. A juxtaposition of imagination, recent experiences, and distant memories re-emerge and reveal themselves in a new way. During this excavation process, fields of color and a painterly surface make their entry, interlocking image and paint.Over the past several years, one of my favorite subjects to paint is the gorilla. As in the painting “Desert Dweller” 2020 they are depicted more as an emblem rather than naturalistic. I like to put them into exaggerated scenarios, sometimes human scenarios. They dominate the picture plane with their monolithic body mass, once again, against fields of color and an active surface.