Today we’d like to introduce you to Abby Brooks.
Hi Abby, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers?
I’ve been creating for as long as I can remember, trying to figure out how I want to express myself. It comes more naturally when you’re little. Whether I was filling spiral notebooks with horse drawings, imagining music videos to my favorite songs, or typing away in the computer room at my childhood home, I was creating something or thinking about it.
When I was in elementary school, I doodled all over the sermon handouts to get through boring church services. In middle school, if there was a pen in my hand during class, I was drawing in the margins of my notes. Don’t be fooled, though. I heard everything! Having been diagnosed with ADHD later in life, I can look back and think that my active hands probably helped me focus more.
I continued on my journey of self-expression in high school, trading long days at track practice my freshman year for long nights of rehearsals for the school plays and musicals. I think the theatre was my saving grace in high school. I took art classes all throughout and even ended my senior year in AP art, but looking back, I was struggling to know what to make and why. I got stuck on realism and perfection. My art was so clouded by fear of judgment or criticism, as were so many things during those formative years.
I chose to stay in Memphis for college, attending the University of Memphis for an art education degree. I actually started out as a journalism major because, well, I liked to write and believed that art is a great talent, not a profession. After one semester, I found out I had to take a newspaper class, and I switched majors right then. I guess the news always stressed me out, and I visualized myself as more of a poet or novelist than a journalist.
So I switched over to art education, although I said many times that in an alternate universe, what I would really be is a tattoo artist. A conservative girl with no ink on her skin could dream, right? More on that later. That last year of college was tough for me in many ways: I was student teaching (basically an unpaid job), had just gotten married, and it was the year my mystery autoimmune disorder decided to really pop off. I won’t go into that too much, but let’s just say that stress will literally make you sick, and my body was showing me that aggressively.
After graduating, I landed the teaching job that many dreams of. I remember being told that this was a retirement job. I could work here forever, which was supposed to be a comforting phrase. But no matter how wonderful the school was (and it was), that scared me. I was just 21, and I adored my students. I was working with all ages from two-year-olds to 8th graders, and teaching these little humans to trust themselves enough to create is something I will always cherish.
Art is a vital subject to teach, I will always say this. Even if you don’t grow up to be an artist, you can always say use the tool of creativity. No matter how much I loved my students, the itch I had to create was too strong, and the days were too short. So after just two years, I left the job I was supposed to retire at to be a self-employed artist, working under the name Heart Over Hand.
Heart Over Hand was actually born while I was still teaching, and I stayed up for long hours after getting home from work to draw and paint. The business started with home and pet portraits, done in pen and ink and watercolor. I slowly started making art prints, stickers, t-shirts, and some jewelry/enamel pins. I remember at the start of that journey, it was the coolest thing to hold a sticker that I designed or see someone wearing a shirt I made. Really, it still is. I stay honored and in awe that people want my art to be theirs.
From the time I quit teaching in early 2019 to this day, Heart Over Hand is still my job, and I’m still selling my art online and at markets like Crosstown’s Crafts and Drafts and painting peoples’ pets, although I add more of my own flair to them now with cowboy hats or fun backgrounds.
But remember the conservative girl daydreaming about alternate universes? She’s started to realize that she could be in control of her own reality. So thanks to the opportunity from my good friend and local tattoo artist, Nathan Parten, I’m almost halfway through my apprenticeship at Trilogy Tattoos, located on Highland by the University of Memphis. Most of my time these days is spent at the shop, learning about the machines, making and putting stencils on clients, and drawing as much as possible. I’ve recently begun practicing tattooing on pig skin under the supervision of one of my talented mentors, Mark Svetz.
The fact that I will be tattooing my art on friends, family, and strangers within a matter of months still makes me feel like I am in an alternate universe. But I think I’ll stay here if that’s the case.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I honestly read this question and laughed a little bit to myself. The road the last few years has been anything but smooth for me, personally, as well as the rest of the world due to the pandemic. The road has gone from bumpy to straight-up cracked, re-paved, and smoothed out the best as possible.
I had my fair share of struggles growing up, but I would say my road was fairly smooth up until I quit my teaching job. While this was absolutely the catalyst for the road ahead to become way more challenging to navigate, it was also necessary for my life to be what I really wanted. I have grown more as a person in the last three years than I could have ever imagined as an exhausted college student, sitting through education courses because I thought the only way I could have a career in art was to teach it.
The years of 2019 to 2022 have been a nonstop transition. Change is really hard and has always been super uncomfortable to me. As someone who’s had anxiety since I was a child, changesets off alarms in my brain and literally makes me itch (remember that autoimmune disorder?)
In 2019, I quit my teaching job and began working for myself full-time. I assured my family that it would be enough, and then reminded myself daily that it had to be, so I made it happen and it was! My business was evolving and succeeding, but then 2o2o happened.
2020 brought about the global stress of a pandemic and the personal stress of going through a divorce and a move (just from East Memphis to midtown, but it could’ve been across the country with the amount of change going on). That year is such a blur, but it was a year of believing in myself more than I ever have in my entire life.
A year of personal growth. Even as my business suffered through, I moved into my new place with my pandemic cat, Dandy. I painted a rainbow mural in the archway of my home and sat under it to grieve the year I felt like I was losing with the rest of the world as well as the years I felt were lost as I floated through life, feeling disconnected from myself.
But growth is realizing that change is necessary, and I had to be able to take control of my own life and make change happen, no matter how scary it was. I had to believe that I was capable even if no one else told me I was. Plenty of people did tell me this, but our own voices are always louder, so we have to make sure we are telling ourselves good things.
Good things like, “I can be a tattoo artist”—the latest transition that I’m going through. I have to remind myself every day that I am capable of the task at hand. I have to remind myself every day that I’m deserving of this opportunity. When my mental health feels like it’s struggling more often than not, I have to remind myself that it doesn’t make me weak or bad, that I’m stronger for doing the thing anyway.
I’ve said multiple times over the past year that I feel like I’m in constant transition and that I’ll never find a landing point, but I know deep down that everything I’ve done and gone through has grown me in ways that I couldn’t always see from the start. And while I’m still working towards the landing point of tattooing right now, I’m recognizing that change is going to be a consistent factor in life and that I am capable of embracing it.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
My art has evolved about as drastically as my life has over the last few years, but our art is certainly a reflection of our lives so it’s reasonable that they would grow and change together. The biggest change in my art isn’t the subject matter or the imagery as much as the palette. The majority of my old work was in black and white.
If you look at my Instagram now, you’ll see lots of colors. I also stopped being so afraid to paint big. I’ve done several large murals over the last few years. It started with the rainbow I painted in my home and went from there. These days, I would say that for the most part, I’m known for my funky pet portraits, my bright murals, and my paintings of the anthropomorphic characters that inhabit my brain.
I do also put my designs on apparel, and one of the best-selling things I’ve made is simply a beanie saying “Overthinking Cap”. It’s really interesting to see what people connect to and what silly ideas I have actually strike a chord. I paint primarily in gouache, but I still use watercolor in some pieces and acrylic on larger scale work. I do a fair amount of digital work these days, too, and I have designed logos for several small businesses. Despite my new love of color, I am rekindling my love for pen and ink while practicing my line work drawing flash during my apprenticeship.
When thinking about what I’m most proud of in my practice, I’d say the fact that I have continued making art even when I mentally couldn’t for a while. The fact that I came back to it, and that I always knew I would. Even with all the doubts I have daily, I can dig my heels in and know that creating is necessary for me, and it’s what I’m going to keep doing. I feel like I’ve been in survival mode for the last few years, and when you are focused on surviving, it can be hard to create.
There was a period of time where I went months without really making anything unless I had to for money. That struggle is still there at times these days, but I can look at how my art has grown and changed and see the things that I’ve been able to create, even with months of stagnancy, and know that my art isn’t going anywhere. I’m excited to see that permanence come to life as I get to put my art on other humans in the not-so-distant future, as well.
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
I mentioned at the beginning of this interview that I was always creating as a child. I was also always performing. Playing piano for patient living rooms of family friends and standing on the highest surface available in public to sing “It’s A Grand Old Flag” at the top of my lungs were some of my favorite pastimes.
While I wanted to focus more on my journey as an artist for this article, my journey as a performer has taught me so much and is a vital part of my story. After experiencing theatre in high school and realizing that I couldn’t just “do” theatre in college while also managing a full load of studio classes and student teaching, I felt like a part of me was hollow. I ended up filling that hole through aerial acrobatics.
I started out sweating and struggling on the aerial silks in a friend’s backyard in 2016 and have since performed aerial routines that I have choreographed and created in more shows than I can count, something I never would have imagined. The personal growth that this art form has supported is drastic. It has instilled a different kind of confidence and strength in me.
I’m now proficient in aerial silks and Lyra and have dabbled in the art of fire eating, which is funny considering I used to refuse to use lighters because the flame “was too close to my thumb”. That’s growth for ya. I do all of this fun stuff with a company of queer-identifying artists and allies, QCG Productions, owned and run by the talented and passionate Aubrey DePew.
We have a wide array of performers in Memphis, Nashville, Birmingham, Florida, and more. I’m honored to have joined this company in its earliest days and have firsthand seen the growth it has fostered and the strong humans it has supported.
A few other things that I don’t want to leave out are some of the educators who have encouraged and supported me all along the way: in high school, my art teacher, Amanda Schulter, and theatre teacher, Kell Christie. In college, the best professor, Holt Brasher. He really encouraged us to experiment and not worry about something being “bad”. This was really my first time feeling like this was okay.
I also want to thank my supportive partner, family, and friends for believing in me LITERALLY no matter what. And finally, thank you to the Memphis Voyager for asking me to do this interview. It was honestly super cathartic to go through!
Contact Info:
- Email: Heartoverhand@yahoo.com
- Website: Www.heartoverhand.com
- Instagram: Www.instagram.com/abbydrawsthings
Image Credits
Cameron Mitchell
