Kyle Brooks
April 10, 2020: If I had to pick one word to summarize Kyle Brooks’ artwork, it would be: happy. Happiness permeates all of Kyle’s work. His joyful folk-art style is truly unique among Atlanta’s street artists. Brooks’ website describes him as “a painter, a poet, and a teller of tales. He aims to ‘paint the world happy’ with his brush, bright colors, and materials found along the way.” Kyle who calls himself a streetfolk artist is known for both his striking red beard and his iconic smiling bear images.
Brooks works in several different mediums ranging from drawings, to murals, wooden roadside installations, and sculpture. He is also the author and illustrator of a children’s book titled “Smile a While”. Kyle turns found objects such as pot lids, tires and articles of clothing into works of art. His wooden cut-outs and sculptures each tell a story through layered pieces and words. Brook’s love for playing with words led to his Street Poetry installations. A typical street poem is a stack of two or three small signs installed on a phone pole with unique word combinations such as “Marathon Logical Fragment” “bouncy people road” or “cake waste”. The intention is to allow every viewer to uniquely interpret the street poetry in a way that is relevant to the viewer. Kyle’s murals can be found all over the city, sponsored by organizations such as the Atlanta Beltline, Forward Warrior and Elevate Atlanta. Brooks also does murals for schools, but his bread and butter is commissioned artwork for large corporate clients such as the Atlanta Braves, Coca-Cola and Home Depot. McDonough High school recently named a scholarship for aspiring art students the “Kyle Brooks Honorary Art Scholarship”
Both lines of Kyle’s family have deep roots in Georgia. Although Brooks was born in Columbus, OH, as a toddler he moved to Atlanta where he has lived most of his life. He spent a pleasant childhood attending the Mt. Carmel Christian School in Stone Mountain. Kyle’s middle-school years were less pleasant comparing his first day at Stockbridge Junior high to being “the newest convict in the prison yard.” In high school, Brooks entertained his classmates by creating doodles and weaving stories to go along with each doodle. His desire to tell a story with each piece of artwork continues to this day. Acquiescing to parental desire, Kyle attended Milligan College, a private Christian liberal arts college in Tennessee. It was not a good fit for Brooks and he left after only two years.
He moved around for a few years trying to find himself including sojourns on the west coast, Tennessee, and Alaska. In 2000, Kyle returned to Atlanta and by good fortune capitalized on his love for doodling landing a job in graphic design. Brooks took up painting in his spare time and became obsessed with it. For the next 8 years, he constantly painted, but didn’t do anything with his artwork. Kyle’s introduction to street art came when he had too much artwork cluttering up the basement of his East Atlanta condo and he began tacking them up on phone poles at night. In 2008 when the recession hit, Brooks lost his full-time job and decided to begin promoting his artwork. He picked “black cat tips” as the name for his website on a whim by putting random words together until he liked the way they sounded. He keeps the “black cat tips” handle to this day. In 2009 Kyle met and married his wife Maria. It was Maria’s insistence that “You’ve just got to do something with these paintings” that prompted Brooks to get a booth in the 2010 East Atlanta Strut and his career as a full-time artist began. Currently Kyle, his wife Maria, and children Teddy and Ruby live in Lithonia, GA near Arabia Mountain. They also have a condo in East Atlanta.
Link to Kyle Brooks’ website: http://www.blackcattips.com/
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