Artist Spotlight- Brooke Germain

Artistic inspiration can come from anywhere, but as time passes, it increasingly comes from online resources. That could mean anything from an inspiring Pinterest board to checking out AI art. For senior visual artist Brooke Germain, it’s the first. Germain’s piece Digital Puberty is the cover of Brushfire’s Spring 2024 edition.

“A lot of artists have more of an education in the classics,” Germain says. “My main influences for my art began online.”

If Tumblr were still a popular media site, Germain would have thousands of followers. Her curated Instagram is filled with indie sleaze-esque pictures, including much of her art. We met after a shared public relations class (she’s majoring in journalism and minoring in graphic design), and her cool-girl attitude knocked me off my feet.

There are many influences in Germain’s piece Digital Puberty, which happens to be the cover of the Brushfire Spring 2024 edition. Germain highlights her Instagram likes from 2011, a photo of her bikini, carpet from her childhood home, and pictures from recent summers as the main parts of Digital Puberty. She wanted to complete a piece about what she found aspirational as a child.

Germain is not alone in this– art grows with the times, and the times are getting technical. Social media allows users to follow any artist with an account, which wasn’t possible 20 years ago. 20 years ago, Germain also couldn’t have used Procreate, which is what she used to edit parts of photos for the main piece. She brought it all together in Photoshop; art is everchanging.

“It was stuff like pictures of puppies and Voldemort,” Germain says with a laugh. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna really edit this so you can’t tell what it is.’ I wanted it to be authentic to that time.”

As a child, Germain was very artistic. She began drawing pretty young and illustrated her own stories in elementary school. She won the esteemed Reading Rainbow award in kindergarten for Best Illustration, and it’s only been uphill from there. Things opened up in high school when she began creating more and illustrating digital ideas.

“Gen Alpha is growing up completely with technology,” Germain says. “I think a lot about that little section of my life where I wasn’t using a screen ever. There was a big shift in my habits.”

Another piece of hers, Heaven Sent Lamprey (also in Brushfire Spring 2024), took a bit of a different path. Germain thrifted the picture frame in the piece and thought it was so cute– too cute. She knew it needed something scarier, so she drew a picture of a lamprey in charcoal. Germain first saw a lamprey, an evil-looking fish, in a book about sea creatures she had as a child.

This ties into another place of inspiration for Germain– religion. She attended a Catholic school until college, and she feels it shaped a large part of who she is. It helps that Catholicism specifically has a lot of romantic undertones, something Brooke leans towards in her art naturally. The nostalgic factor of religion plays a big role in her art.

“I do have a religious background. I don’t really practice anymore,” Germain says. “But I do still hold on to those values a little bit. This lamprey really is one of God’s creatures, even though it looks like it came out of Hell.”

Growing up is obviously a big part of Germain’s work (see: Digital Puberty), but girlhood specifically is what makes her creative juices flow. She cites Sofia Coppola as a big inspiration, and we talk about our favorites (hers is The Bling Ring). Coppola is known for directing stories about girlhood and what it means to grow up female. 

She also really enjoys the work of Louise Bourgeois, a French artist. Bourgeois mostly works with sculptures and some paintings, but the nature of her work is very feminine. This flows well with Germain’s other inspirations and her own creativity.

“I’m obsessed with her. She’s just this old, cranky French woman,” Germain says. “A lot of her work is also focused on her childhood and what it’s like to be a girl.”

Germain will graduate at the end of this semester with a major in Journalism (PR and Advertising emphasis) and a minor in graphic design. Post-graduation, she’d like to become a designer at an agency outside Reno. Working with fashion graphics or at a PR firm is her first goal, but she’s open to anything. Her main concern is seeing art as a source of income. Some of the “fun” of art is taken out when relying on it as a livelihood. By looking away from the dollar, Brooke will grow and thrive anywhere.

“I wouldn’t want to make a career out of my art, because then it would take some of the joy out of it,” Germain says. “I don’t like having that pressure on me when I’m making art.”

Brooke can be found on Instagram @9ermain.