Banner year for Leonard Brooks
By Wayne Greenhaw, Sept 29, 2006

The 94-year-old dean of San Miguel de Allende’s artistic community, Leonard Brooks, continues to paint daily. He has been invited to exhibit his major watercolor paintings at the National Watercolor Museum/Museo Nacional de la Acuarela, beginning at noon on Sunday, October 8, in Coyoacán in Mexico City.

In his “Exhibition of Watercolors/Exhibición de Acuarelas,” 35 of the maestro’s finest works will be displayed through October 22. The “Exhibition of Watercolors” will be his fourth one-man show in Mexico City. Also in late September, a book titled My Watercolor World with approximately 65 of Brooks’s finest watercolors will be published. 

Born in London in 1911, Brooks moved to Canada as a baby with his family, grew up in Toronto and began painting there as a boy. In the 1930s he was recognized as a superb artist of the Canadian countryside. In 1938 he was elected to the Royal Academy of the Arts. After serving with the Royal Navy as a war artist during World War II, Brooks and his wife, Reva, a native of Toronto, moved to San Miguel in 1947. Many of Brooks’s paintings of war-torn London, sailors peeling potatoes on a Corvette in a mid-Atlantic convoy and others, now hang with the work of other wartime artists in the War Museum of Canada in Ottawa, the nation’s capital.

Upon their arrival in San Miguel, where Brooks came to study art under an 11-month program with the art school established by Stirling Dickinson in what has become Bellas Artes, the couple moved into a house near Dickinson in the country on the street now known as Santo Domingo. 

At the Fine Arts School, Brooks’s work flourished. California writer MacKinley Helm, an expert on Mexican art, wrote, “Leonard Brooks has entered into the life of Mexico as few foreign painters seem to have done in my time. I do not know any other foreigner who has painted Mexico as the Mexicans paint it.” The master muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros wrote glowingly of Brooks’s work. In 1957, Brooks signed a contract to write the first of eight books on art, Watercolor: A Challenge. Each would become a bestseller.

In San Miguel, where Brooks taught young Mexican children to play violin and viola, he became the director of music at Bellas Artes, without salary, while continuing his painting.

Through the years Brooks continued to work with young musicians in San Miguel. Leonard arranged for the Fine Arts Quartet of Chicago to perform in San Miguel, thus initiating the Festival de Música de Camara in 1979. Leonard did collages for the next 10 Festival posters, of which hundreds were sold to bring in extra revenue. Later, Leonard created posters for his friend, renowned cellist Gilberto Munguia, who directed the Festival de San Miguel, a 10-day December event. 

Following a year in Europe, he and Reva returned to their Mexican home. In 1965, he was invited to hang a one-man show at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, the ultimate reward for any artist in a country that holds its painters in the highest esteem. On October 29, 479 guests paraded through the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes to view his work. In Novedades, critic Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna wrote that his work showed “deep personal reflection.” He added that Brooks “is a superb colorist and a consummate master of his craft. He is a painter, an excellent painter.”

In 1976, Brooks was invited a second time to give a one-man show at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. Again, the critic for Novedades wrote that his work showed “inexhaustible creative versatility. He is the complete artist, he lacks nothing. He can create, in every theme, all the imaginable colors.”

In 1984, Canadian Ambassador J. Russell McKinney suggested an opening of Brooks’s art in Mexico City to be followed by a countrywide tour. It would be a 30-year retrospective of his work as part of the 50th anniversary celebration of the National Institute of Fine Arts. With 69 oils, acrylics, collages and five tapestries, it opened at the Canadian embassy and traveled for two months to Guadalajara, Monterrey, Aguascalientes, Morelia and San Luis Potosí, with the last stop in San Miguel.

At this last opening at Bellas Artes in San Miguel, he announced his retirement as director of music. Former student Estela Macias told the audience, “He helped us not only in music and painting, but also economically, including clothes and food and other kinds of studies.”

In 2001, fellow Canadian John Virtue wrote a highly praised biography of the couple, Leonard and Reva Brooks: Artists in Exile in San Miguel de Allende, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. In 2003, Canadians Marilyn Westlake and Margot Smallwood Boland put together a book of Reva’s photographs that was also highly praised. As the book was published and her works put on display at Bellas Artes in San Miguel, in February of 2004, Reva died quietly in a nearby hospital.

The exhibition of Leonard Brooks’s watercolors this October in Mexico City has been a team effort by Brooks’s friends Edmundo and Caryl Aquino, with the help of Sandra Walz de Homberg, president of the Mexican Society of Watercolorists, or Sociedad Mexicana de Acuarelistas, and the director of the National Watercolor Museum, Beatriz Gaminde.

You can learn more about Leonard Brooks and his work at his new website: www.leonardbrooksartist.com 



Wayne Greenhaw, 2006 winner of the Harper Lee Award for Distinguished Writing, lives in San Miguel and Montgomery, Alabama. He is author of My Heart Is in the Earth: True Stories of Alabama and Mexico.

Message from Sandra Homberg
President of the Sociedad Mexicana de Acuarelistas

Some things just happen once in a lifetime, and we have the privilege to experience one such a happening with the presence of Leonard Brooks, and to be able to admire his art of over 80 years. Probably he is the only artist able to show us the evolution of watercolor painting through different stages and the use of different techniques. The long road that he has traveled with watercolor takes us from the pure use of water with pigments, the use of casein, the combination of various water media, the integration of acrylics, always with watercolor as a main medium. Considering the themes that he has approached, he has also wandered through landscapes, people and abstract paintings, always expressing the most deep feelings and emotions with his brush that caresses the paper.

We feel very honored to be able to show his magnificent work in the Museo Nacional de la Acuarela, and personally I feel very happy to have this important gallery show his work, and most of all to have him present for this special historical presentation. He is also an artist in other fields; he is a writer, a violinist and a person who has dedicated his whole life to art, which pours out of his heart.

At the Sociedad Mexicana de Acuarelistas, we are eager to be able to admire his work and to learn from it. What he can give us as a person will be of invaluable importance.

The Heart of Frida

Frida Kahlo’s Secret Letters & Drawings

Top Floor, Casa Maxwell

Reservations at www.Frida2007.com 

Donations benefit the San Miguel Red Cross

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo came close to being “murdered by life,” not only by the tragic accident that forced her to endure a life of physical pain and continual surgeries but also by her tumultuous, passionate love for her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. The intimate exhibit of “Secret Letters and Drawings” by Frida Kahlo at the new museum The Heart of Frida offer an emotionally charged encounter with the complex icon-artist.

The letters and notes on yellowed pages speak the many voices of Frida’s love for Diego—from tender and protective, gentle voices to the sensual and passionately explosive and the caustic and destructive scorn of a woman in pure rage. Despite these complex and conflicting emotions, the audience cannot help but admire the depth and purity of Frida’s emotional intensity.

My love for you will become a myth, a legend.… They all loved you and you despised them all and Frida more.… But I am not poor and you don’t despise me…I am great, because loving you the way I love, not many love as I love you….

I am Frida Kahlo

The exhibit opens to the public on October 2. There is no admission charge, but the exhibit is dedicated to the Red Cross, and Graeme and Joanne Howard hope the public will reflect their enjoyment through generous donations. They hope to raise 750,000 pesos for the indispensable Red Cross emergency service that handles up to 100 calls weekly. The funds will be used to increase staff salaries and hire more desperately needed staff. To make online reservations, visit www.Frida2007.com 

Eleven artists featured at Generator

Art Opening Leigh Hyams & “Paper Works”

Saturday, September 30, 5:30pm 

Generator Gallery, Fabrica La Aurora Design Center

During the month of October, Generator Gallery shows recent works by Leigh Hyams and paper works and works on paper by 10 other outstanding artists.

Hyams’s work includes a series of large, unstretched canvases and a few exquisite works on paper. Hyams paints plant life, mostly flowers, as metaphors for balance, movement and the poetry in beautiful, living organisms. The colors are vibrant, wet, running, transparent, loosely applied like huge, magnificent watercolors dripping down in endless streams of beautiful color.

The show also features 10 exceptional artists—Patricia Alvarez, Jane Evans, Lynne Gleason, Sioban O’Donahue, Ornella Ridone, Alejandro Rivera Leal, Lavinia Ruiz, Gary Slipper, Edgar Soberón and Umberto Spindola—who present very distinct visions of paper and works on paper.