‘Hope’ springs eternal - Visual artist and former Edna Manley vice-principal publishes career retrospective

As glimpses of life’s rear-view peek in, visual artist Hope Brooks has embraced an exciting new chapter.
A seminal figure in the Jamaican art world, the painter and retired educator – who just turned 82 last month – recently added published creative to a storied career of high points.
Hope Brooks: Five Decades of the Artist’s Work, a deep-dive retrospective into her abstract and mixed media craft that began in the 1960s, was launched in May at The Olympia Gallery.
Two months later, the sprightly octogenarian is as meditative about the journey of bringing the 248-page coffee-table book to fruition as she was speaking before an audience of her nearest and dearest at the book launch.
“It was a New Year’s meeting I had with my good friend Opal Palmer Adisa [educator, gender activist and poet] 10 years ago, where she asked what my plans were for the year ahead. I told her: ‘I am going to publish a book,’” Brooks recounted of the springboard that led to extensively documenting a half-century’s trove of searing visuals she’s created on canvas and murals.
“I suppose this is another stage of a professional artist’s life. A lot of artists often have other people publish books about them after they’re dead,” she matter-of-factly explained during a Sunday Gleaner sit-down at her split-level St Andrew townhouse in the ‘Golden Triangle’.
“While it’s not unheard of for a living artist to self-publish, I don’t know how I came to the idea of wanting to publish, to be quite honest, but I must have been subconsciously thinking about it when Opal had asked that question.”
Brooks is comfortably seated in a wooden recliner in her living room-cum-work studio. Framed photographs from eras of an accomplished life, stacked bookshelves, and paintings of hers and other colleagues adorn the space.
Brooks’ espresso-hued shih tzu, Taj, jostles for attention at her feet, rambunctiously darting about as she engages in conversation. Brooks quiets him by feeding him Excelsior water crackers at 10-minute intervals.
Sectionalised by decades – from the 1970s to the 2010s – Hope Brooks: Five Decades of the Artist’s Work is an Austin Macauley Publishers title.
With offices spread across London, New York, and the United Arab Emirates, Brooks said she engaged the overseas imprint “after I waited for over a year on local publishers and never got a response, a positive one anyway”.
The tome features a foreword by her longtime friend and senior lecturer on Chinese culture at The University of the West Indies, Dr Courtney Hogarth.
Canadian-based, Jamaican-born art historian Rosalie Smith McRae, whom Brooks revealed “I had known for many years when she worked at the National Gallery of Jamaica”, contributed the essay titled ‘Painter and Teacher: The Arc of the Practice’.
Primarily photographed by her granddaughter Destinee Condison, the book’s subject, whose abstract work dabbles in political themes and is frequently executed in multi-panels, raved about her progeny’s artistic contributions.
“I was lucky to have Destinee,” she piped up, “because I couldn’t have afforded someone to shoot over the two years it took to locate the artwork, which had been bought by many persons, or in corporate or personal galleries. She was constantly driving all over Jamaica for quite some time.”
Brooks knew from childhood that art was her destined career. “From six years old, even before I knew I was going to be an artist, I mean, it’s such a strange thing. I don’t remember wanting to be anything else,” reflected the visual artist, who stays fit with twice-weekly yoga sessions at home.
The Wolmer’s Preparatory and Wolmer’s Girls School alumna left The Rock at 18 for Scotland to pursue higher education. “When I finished high school, I applied to the Edinburgh College of Art because at the time my art teacher, Valerie Bloomfield, was Scottish and she had studied at Glasgow, but I had never heard of Glasgow. I knew of the University of Edinburgh as it was famous, so I applied and was accepted,” shared the second child of the late engineer Cecil George Brooks and his homemaker wife, Gwendolyn.
“My brother Oliver was the bright one and always placed in class every year, and was going to study chemistry. Those things impressed my father. He used to say, ‘Hope is going to be an artist. That’s okay because she is going to get married and her husband will support her.’”
Ironically, life dealt a different hand of cards – as a progressive, go-getter – that her father had not foreseen. In fact, marriage proved merely a brief interlude. In between her time studying at Edinburgh, she would have a meet-cute at the Hope Botanical Gardens with Howard Parchment, a fellow artist, on one of her summer holiday returns to Kingston.
Painting in the gardens, a then-twentysomething Hope remembered, “He was driving by and asked what the heck I was drawing. He said he was building a house in Irish Town and invited me out for a drink.”
A courtship followed, and the two would wed soon thereafter. It did not last. “I just got led by the nose, really. It wasn’t something I was dead set against, but it wasn’t one of these things where I saw the next thing in my life is to get married. Two years into the marriage, I said, ‘No, no, no. I think I should be single’.”
Hope’s four-year sojourn reading for an art degree in Europe brought its own cultural and climatic insights. “The weather in Scotland was so vastly different to here, and on account of that, in my final two years of Scotland, I started to talk about Jamaica in my art,” the then-Caribbean transplant recalled.
“I did a two-year course in mural painting, and we had to paint large. I remember doing three large paintings about Jamaica, but they were too big, so when I was coming home, I couldn’t bring them, which is a shame because when I wrote to the college years later, they told me unfortunately they had to destroy my paintings because they didn’t have storage space, so they’re gone.”
What remained in spades, however, was her artistic passion. That drive produced an impressive output of artwork in the ensuing years.
Brooks is, too, a former vice-principal at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. She joined the staff in 1967 from its embryonic days at North Street in downtown Kingston, all the way through its physical relocation, diversified course offerings and accreditation expansion at the current Arthur Wint Drive address.
She was instrumental in the seismic shift of Edna Manley College’s transition from a diploma-to-degree-granting tertiary institution, while embracing motherhood in her early 30s.
Brooks adopted two young girls, Venice and her sister Mojiba, shortly after the tragic passing of their parents, reggae originator Count Ossie and his partner Constance Priestley.
Of motherhood, she’s proudest of the women she raised and her granddaughters, Destinee, an in-demand photographer, and Kai Tappler, who is off to Europe later this year to study.
Promoted up the ranks from head of the Two-Dimensional Design Department to director of studies for the art school, and eventually head of school – while securing a master’s degree at the Maryland Institute along the way – she recalled, “Michael Manley got up one day in Parliament and said he’s going to bring Edna Manley College under The University of the West Indies (UWI) so that Edna could award degrees.”
She remembered that there was pushback from UWI. “They said to do a bachelor’s, you would have to have a minimum of 60-odd credits in university courses, and then the rest would be Edna Manley courses, but that would have left out 1,330 credits, and most of the programmes would be UWI courses, which couldn’t train you to do anything in art.”
Brooks was not having it. The arts school saw no significant value in UWI’s position. “We said this degree doesn’t suit us at all, and in fact, no one who wanted to train as an artist registered for it,” she told The Sunday Gleaner.
Remedying the kerfuffle, she made arrangements with the University Council of Jamaica. The organisation requested a programme outline that detailed what all the courses and objectives for each department for a four-year period would look like.
“It was quite a big job to put together that proposal, so we worked on that for many years with the heads of schools at Edna because they knew the programme and I just knew the process. We went through it together and became a degree-granting institution, and then I began to work with the performing arts school. They joined in after.”
From her past days leading a transformation of Edna Manley College to the present-day publishing of her impressive oeuvre, Brooks has much to muse on.
Art for her means self-expression. “It’s like writing. You talk about things that impact your mind and your visuals. The last painting I did, ‘Goat Islands’, talked about the controversy between Jamaica and China vis-à-vis the Goat Islands. The images of the island don’t give a literal story ... it’s about the islands as a place that became politically important for a short period of Jamaican life.”
As for what’s on the agenda these days, Brooks said, “I’m waiting to see. You know, people ask me if I’m painting. I don’t need to get up and paint every day like going to work. I need to have something to say. I’m waiting to see what will come along which would make me feel about it,” she shared, noting that her canvas and paint brushes were close at hand should inspiration strike.

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