About First Person Artist
First Person Artist is a library of ideas and interviews, that I started in the early 2000s as a blog when blogging was not yet a word nor social media even a glimmer in the Internet’s eye. Most galleries didn’t even have websites and finding information about living breathing contemporary artists was behind a walled garden of galleries and curiously difficult. And yet I knew, as an artist myself, who cruised down the 405 Freeway every day to head to my studio in Venice, that there were tens of thousands of us, toiling away in solitude.

Those were the days.  The Internet offered unlimited space and no authority or editor to say what we could or couldn’t do or say. The act could be as solitary as painting, or as I would soon learn, pierce the monastic bubble around an artists and allow them to share directly with an audience.  Also, I could interview any artist whose work I admired and share the conversation with anyone who cared to listen. I created a weekly schedule and published every Friday. That is how I started First Person Artist.

Writing regularly was just like painting, as long as it was done in layers. The first draft was always an atmospheric blob of thoughts, and then the outlines would emerge. Coaxing and refining would give way to buffing and polishing. My children were young and I would come up with ideas for introductions while watching them play or riding my turquoise beach cruiser down to the Venice Boardwalk or sprawled on the tiny patch of grass outside my studio for some sun. Art has always been on my mind.  There was no social media, Smart phones were hardly a thing and I resisting getting one for a long.  It was a glorious prelapsarian moment where anyone could have a voice and it was not marred by selfies or highly curated digital portraits.

This all seems so quaint now, I know.

At the time, “blogging” felt like a revolution. Like the prisoners had escaped and everyone with ideas finally spoke at the same decibel as the “professionals” (critics, etc.) who supposedly had the last word. One of those fugitives was certainly me.

Don’t Blink!

Arianna Huffington, asked me to create an Arts section for a new website she was creating called the Huffington Post and it soon it grew into a place where everyone congregated. It was once the coolest thing. It got bigger than me, then bigger than the ocean, then bigger than my art career. So, after creating this mountain of literature and inviting all these people to blog, I left.

Art is an enduring relationship with the world.

Being an artist requires hours of solitude and perseverance.   A deep dive into some topic that’s bobbling around in my mind. But when I come out of the water, I can see sky and clouds and want to visit land and eventually it makes diving back in so much more rewarding.

These are the days. All bets are off. There are no rules, only so much art. Welcome.

Kimberly Brooks
Los Angeles

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