She was expected to become a doctor, she owned and ran an aesthetics salon for 15 years, dabbled in restaurant ownership for a short time, and more recently sold big-ticket aesthetics equipment to doctors and high-end salons before giving up her job a few months ago to pursue her art full time.
Thirty-nine-year-old Brooke deBruin cringed when she realized her mother might read about her career change in the local community newspaper, and thought she be wise to give her a heads up first.
deBruin is what she calls the “red sheep” of her family, the only one that has any interest in the arts.
“I’m the one off in my bloodline,” she said.
“Honestly, this is the last thing I ever thought I’d be doing,” said the Langley artist who will be one of more than a hundred set up at the 25th annual Arts Alive Festival in downtown Langley City this Saturday.
Beyond doodling a little bit in elementary school and playing the saxophone throughout high school, this woman with a background in sciences had never shown any inclination towards the arts before.
Then, four years ago – not long after moving to Langley from the Prairies – deBruin found herself bored and said a late-night run to WalMart changed her life.
She bought a package of drawing pencils, started sketching out a few of the characters from the TV show Breaking Bad, shared a few of the images on her social media pages, garnered a lot of positive feedback and a few commissions, and realized she had a natural aptitude for art.
In particular, she learned she has a propensity for portraits, although she’s segued into pet pictures and even the occasional landscape in recent months. She even painted a beach scene on a “rather large” door.
“Portrait work is definitely my specialty,” she expounded, noting she started off with charcoals, graduated to pencil crayons, switched it up with paint in January, and graduating through pastels, watercolours, and oils to a point now where she’s working predominantly with acrylics.
It has been a year of firsts for the artist who works out of a converted livingroom-turned-studio in her Willoughby home. She’s evolved from drawing to painting this year. She started doing pet portraits after losing one of her own dogs back in March. And now, she’s venturing out in her sales approach.
While most of her work to date has been bought online (she has more than 24,000 followers on Instagram) or been commissioned, Arts Alive will be her first sojourn into the world of art shows and sales.
But she doesn’t believe it will be her last.
She’ll be bringing quite the collection of pieces to the show, including a few finished works that her past clients have lent her for display at her first exhibition.
She’ll be set up near the entrance to Salt Lane with a myriad of her paintings and drawings, some framed and others unframed. deBruin predicts there will be at least 50 drawings and two dozen of her paintings on display, a series of greeting cards, and of course her easel set up so she can work during what she calls the lulls in discussions with onlookers.
Today, deBruin is working full-time drawing and painting, and can’t envision her life veering too dramatically far off that path.
“It’s hard to believe I just stumbled into it one night on a whim,” when she went pencil shopping.
“It’s been a really interesting ride… Who would have thought I’d have found this,” deBruin said. “I wouldn’t have it any other way… This is what I was supposed to do, I think.”
