Meet Annie Brooks | Painter, Designer, Calligrapher, & Business Owner

We had the good fortune of connecting with Annie Brooks and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Annie, what habits do you feel play an important role in your life?
Practicing Play, Imagination, and Audacity, and putting those things together in a big, triple shot habit-cocktail has been my door to delight. More than anything, I want my work to function as little pockets of delight that people can have for themselves, so inviting delight into my own life is imperative for making the work that I want to make.

Making Play a habit is, hands down, the most important ingredient in my business. Play is tactile. It’s sensual. It is participation. It’s how you interact with the textures and colors around you. Play gives delight, imagination and innovation an opportunity to visit you. It’s so powerful that it taught each one of us how to talk, how to walk, and how to be a part of this complex community on this planet. We became adults by playing our way here. Why do we stop? The habit of Play keeps me engaged in my own life and gives me the energy to approach my work with a sense of newness and happiness year after year. Play is how I mine for energy, and how I mine for information about what I want to do next. Unplugged, honest attention is getting harder and harder to practice but the habit of Play demands time unplugged from social media, it demands an innocent honesty with yourself, and it demands your full attention.

The second most important habit for keeping my business and my art moving forward is Imagination. Imaginative thinking/living/working is a habit. It’s a lot like play, but it’s different. Play can be purely physical, but imagination is born in that place in all of us that likes to take risks, to push the envelope. Imagination requires a certain amount of letting go, and that letting go is necessary for innovation. When we imagine, we have to be willing to be wrong, to be ridiculous, and to be temporarily free from all kinds of mental structures that are usually useful for day-to-day living. It displays a certain kind of creative intelligence because it says, “I understand how things are, and now I can see how things COULD be.” Making Imagination a habit has kept my idea-making muscles limber and strong. It makes brainstorming less scary, and it makes coming up with ideas of things to paint more enjoyable, like taking a little vacation in my mind where I come back with bags full of goodies.

Lastly, Audacity is a hugely important habit for me. Audacity doesn’t always follow confidence. Sometimes you just have to practice it as a habit. My first few paintings at The Wells Makery were, in my opinion, not good. Not good at all! I didn’t have a lot of experience painting, but I wanted to be a painter so badly and I loved making things so much. I took those clumsy early jobs very seriously. I charged well for them. I poured my heart and my time into them. I advertised and boasted them when they were finished. I submitted them to blogs and published them. It was audacious, to publicize art that was so….rough. Audacity is humbling, because you have to take your work seriously even when you know that more experienced artists are going to be watching you take yourself seriously. And that’s okay! Audacity is a trust fall. It takes audacity to be imaginative, and it takes audacity to turn imaginative ideas into something real, and it takes audacity to then say “Hey! You should buy this imaginative idea that I turned into a thing!” Audacity doesn’t need to be obnoxious or arrogant, it can be a playful invitation for others to participate in the things that delight you.

These habits are terribly simple. They don’t require waking up or going to bed at a specific hour. They don’t require checkboxes or organization or structure. They’re just a pair of shoes that you put on, and you start walking…or hopscotching…or two-stepping….or whatever it is you like to do best.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I grew up backstage at my parent’s concerts, and sitting next to my mom at her art desk while she illustrated kids books and made puppets and sculpted scenes from Mother Goose out of Sculpty. I’d set up lemonade stands, but instead of lemonade, I was selling my crayon drawings of frogs in princess crowns. I spent a lot of time backstage at my parent’s concerts, and I had to entertain myself, so I wrote stories and songs and drew pictures. And I just never stopped.

I recorded my first album when I was 18, and my husband and I started our photography business a few years later. We were making money by teaching art and photography classes to kids, but our photography business finally caught some momentum and we were able to quit teaching and work as photographers full time. We were in Porto, Portugal, meeting up with some other photographers and they showed us their studio and I found myself more drawn to the wedding invitation samples on their desk, than in the photography tips they were giving us. That’s when my life made a huge pivot and I started working in watercolor. That was in 2015.

I was already really connected with the international wedding market, so switching over to logo design and wedding stationery didn’t feel scary, even though it was a really huge and risky leap. The bloggers and stylists and planners that I knew were so supportive and excited and helpful. Community is everything. A story is carved and colored by the characters in it.

That same year I hired my best friend, Whitney Watts to be a painter and designer at my new business, The Wells Makery. Whitney and I both needed to make a living, to remain mobile, and to be able to giggle at our work, and so we shaped the style that we have now. Our painting style celebrates playfulness and detail, our entire studio fits in a tote, and we work small so that we can finish projects within months or weeks.

If our work communicates one thing, I hope it’s a relief-sigh of playfulness, like a miniature little vacation. I hope it flickers like fireflies and sparks folks to remember to give in to delight during mundane moments of the day. The biggest compliment is when someone says that our work inspired them to do something or make something. That’s when I feel like we’ve succeeded in using art to participate in the story.

I don’t want to end my story with doing commissioned work for clients. I just finished writing and illustrating my first storybook, and I’d really like to make more. Maybe I’ll make lots! Or maybe I’ll change my mind and decide to get into stop motion or professional dress-up or top secret music or needle felting. That’s why I called it a Makery. At a Makery, you can make anything. It’s good to leave your titles open-ended, because you never know what you’ll want to make next.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
If my friend came to town, we’d spend a day downtown. My favorite things to hit are coffee at The Durango Coffee Company, Toast Records for music, Studio& for the artwork, Colorado Vintage for curated vintage clothes, Dryside Designs for locally designed clothing and accessories, and the Antique Market to look for unexpected treasure made like we don’t make them anymore. Pizza at 11th Street Station and cocktails at El Moro are a must.

We’d be so terribly full that we’d hope desperately for an underground dance party. Our chances would be 50/50 that one would be happening, because Durango is 50% quiet and 50% not quiet. With luck, we’d catch a local DJ at Channel37 and end the night dancing and catching up with local artists and makers.

Durango also begs for outdoor attention, so we’d spend a day on the river, catch the sunset up at the college or from the top of Hogsback.

We’d spend a day biking the river trail and stopping at bookstores and ice cream stands and to watch rapid surfers at Smelter.

Then, of course, Red Mountain Pass cannot be missed. Driving north through Silverton and Ouray is my favorite drive in the world. There are so many places to stop and feel small-in-a-good-way. That’s an important thing to do in life.

If we had time, we’d camp in my sometimes-working 70s boogie van, either on Molas pass or in Mancos, or somewhere near a hot spring. The camping trip would, of course, center around using fire to make food (preferably cheese) hot while telling jokes, and we’d do that all day.

If I can coerce a person into rollerskating in parking lots with me, I can spend an entire day doing that too, but most people don’t like to risk a wrist break on their vacation, and I get that. If my guest was in to biking or climbing or skiing or trail running or nearly any other outdoor sport imaginable, they could do that in some insanely pristine local places while I roll around the parking lot on my 8 pink wheels, and I would respect them for that deeply.

The best thing about this area is the people. The artists and shop owners and musicians and teachers and connectors and baristas and chefs and designers give this place life. A lot of that life is downtown, a lot of it is in homes or warehouses, a lot of it is in the mountains.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I’d strongly recommend Julia Cameron’s Artists Way 12 week program for anyone wanting to make a habit of Play, Imagination and Audacity, and to anyone wanting to indulge their inner child for the sake of creativity.

Also, I couldn’t do what I do without my business partner Whitney Watts, who’s art and laughter has made the world a much better place for me since I was 10 years old.

Website: www.thewellsmakery.com

Instagram: thewellsmakery

Image Credits
Brumley & Wells J Lambert Photography Kim Branagan