Lauren Petrick Brooks is a Baltimore-based painter whose work explores intimacy, touch, and emotional connection through the overlooked details and subtle textures of daily life. Working in oil and graphite, she builds her images patiently and deliberately, allowing process and meaning to unfold together. Her paintings and drawings center on the quiet moments of everyday life—light raking across a cast-iron grate, the nestling weight of a loved one’s feet. These moments matter to her not only as acts of close looking but as reflections of how we relate to places, objects, and one another. What may seem ordinary holds profound emotional charge. By enlarging or isolating these moments, she invites viewers to pause, to notice, and to reflect on the layered complexities of being close.
Brooks’s practice is rooted in close observation and care, inviting viewers to pause and reflect on the layered complexities of being close. Her compositions hover between recognition and ambiguity, mirroring the ways relationships evolve through what is revealed, withheld, and left unspoken.
Her work has been exhibited nationally, including in an exhibition curated by John Yau and a juried exhibition selected by Catherine Murphy. She received third place in the 2023 Miami University Young Painters Competition, juried by Yau. Brooks earned her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art and her BFA in Studio Art from The University of Texas at Austin.
Alongside her studio practice, Brooks brings more than fifteen years of experience in arts education and public programming. She designs and leads workshops in museums, libraries, and schools—extending her studio practice into community spaces where art becomes a shared language of connection and reflection.