By choosing to use an airbrush Brooks ensures that there is no immediately discernible gestural trace of the artist. Its diffuse, atomising, particulate nature causes a fetishistic fixation with the surface, the 'skin' of the painting, echoing the fascination with the skin of the subject. Before the advent of digital manipulation the airbrush was the tool used in the trade of fashion photography to erase blemishes and wrinkles from images of models.
Brooks positions himself within the skin of the painting, he becomes his own surface. When we first see a painting by Brooks we may think we are looking at a photograph, but very rapidly we experience the strangeness of their suspension between photography and painting, they seem uneasy with themselves, stateless, maculate migrants from the painted world, suspended in an etiolated entropic void, tormented by the ghost of photography.