Hi there! I’m Brooke.
I’m all about creativity, fashion, entrepreneurship, and learning more about what I don't know.
When I was 8 years old, I bought my first sketchbook and charcoals and I’ve been creating ever since. With an insatiable curiosity and stubborn independence, I was always on a path towards self-employment, selling my creations about as soon as I started drawing. At the age of 20, I started my first business, a secondhand clothing store with a focus on sustainable practices and responsible clothing disposal. Ever since then, it’s been a headfirst dive into the sustainable fashion industry with a specialization in digital marketing and content creation alongside business ownership.
I have always held a variety of interests. No one is ever just one thing, after all. As someone who operates between the tension of artistic drive and rationality and logic, I’ve always struggled not to compartmentalize those two seemingly opposite parts of myself (though I don’t find them so different anymore). Yet, my academic-inspired desire to learn when combined with my creativity is what has made my work all the better. I offer a balance of strategic thinking and creative curiosity. What does this mean practically? That I’m a total nerd about psychology, entrepreneurial innovation, and market trends. But I’m also hugely inspired by poetry, classic literature, and art for art’s sake.
An Approach to Work & Life
With degrees in both Fine Art and Entrepreneurship, I’ve found that art and business have a lot in common and a lot to teach each other. As an entrepreneur, I’m most interested in the intersections of art, sustainable fashion, women, and creative content. As an artist, I see art as a change-agent, and I want my work to create conversations for progress. I create art that speaks to the beauty I find around me but also to issues I want to bring to light. Trained in design-thinking, I approach all my work with the goal of understanding who I’m serving and how I can apply creative problem-solving to meet needs and exceed expectations.
At their best, business and art are powerful tools of creation and service.
It is my belief that successful businesses will possess the empathy and storytelling practices of the arts. Likewise, good art comes from a place of cultural examination and serves to fill a need, much like a business solves problems. As a business owner and an artist, I know the two disciplines have much to offer each other. It is my goal to synthesize both to create effective, positive impact.
Areas of Specialization
Fine Art: Portraiture, Oil Painting
Writing: Editorial, Essays, Education, & Poetry
Digital Marketing & Branding
Social Media & Content Creation
Curiosities & Questions
What role can art play in social change? How can we integrate art into our everyday experiences?
How can we communicate more effectively about the changes we need to make and invite more people into conversations and participating (climate, sustainable fashion, compassion)?
What can we do with all of the clothing excess that culture doesn’t value as we wait for textile recycling tech to catch up?
The Fun Stuff
Current reads - The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. Find my all-time favs here.
Favorite art styles - Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, Contemporary Portraiture and Figurative Work
Favorite poets - William Stafford, David Whyte, Ada Limón
How I take my coffee - Black, single-origin pour over
Favorite podcasts - On Being with Krista Tippett, If Books Could Kill, HBR After Hours
Press
“You stand before beginnings. I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. Perhaps you are indeed carrying within yourself the potential to visualize, to design, and to create for yourself an utterly satisfying, joyful, and pure lifestyle. Discipline yourself to attain it, but accept that which comes to you with deep trust, and as long as it comes from your own will, from your own inner need, accept it, and do not hate anything.”