The Artist
Brooke Chanelle
Art is the first language I learned to speak fluently.
Brooke Chanelle is a Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist working across acrylic painting, mixed media, and tattooing. Her practice is rooted in the expressive potential of contrast — bold, layered, and unapologetically alive.
Brooke Chanelle is a Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist working across acrylic painting, mixed media and tattooing. Her practice explores memory, identity and human connection through expressive portraiture and symbolic imagery. She completed a Diploma of Visual Art at RMIT in 2019 and has worked professionally in the tattoo industry since the same year.
Her paintings draw on personal experiences of love, grief, intimacy and self-discovery, using layered imagery, abstraction and unexpected colour to explore how perception and meaning can shift. Through distortion, inversion and details that reveal themselves over time, Brooke invites viewers to look beyond their first impression. Her work holds its own on a gallery wall while finding a personal place in everyday life—in homes, workspaces and on skin.
Alongside her visual art practice, Brooke is the owner and senior artist at Novani Studio in Lilydale, specialising in black and grey realism, fine line, florals and ornamental tattooing. Her experience working on skin continues to inform her approach to composition and personal symbolism, creating work that becomes part of someone's space, story or sense of self.
Artist Statement
I make work that asks you to pause. To feel something before you try to explain it. I'm drawn to the space between what we reveal and what we protect, where softness, strength and vulnerability exist together.
Making art gives me space to sit with feelings I don't always have words for. Some works begin with something deeply personal; others come from curiosity, an image I can't let go of, or the simple pleasure of creating. I allow each piece to move between those places without needing to resolve everything it holds.
I'm interested in the tension between beauty and unease. A figure can appear strong while carrying tenderness; an intimate moment can feel comforting and exposed at once. Colour, movement and obscured details help me explore those feelings, leaving room for more than one reading.
Although the starting point is often my own experience, the meaning doesn't belong only to me. I want people to recognise something of themselves in the work, or notice something different when they return to it. That connection might be a memory, a feeling, or simply a moment of presence.
Process
Colour & Feeling
A piece often begins with a feeling, an image or a colour relationship. I explore the palette and composition together, allowing each to shape the direction of the work.
Build up layers
Paint is applied in multiple sessions, each layer dry before the next. This creates depth and allows earlier decisions to show through, adding depth and traces of how the piece has evolved.
Refine & Resolve
I step back, revisit details and adjust the balance between movement and stillness. knowing when to stop is part of the process. Recognising when the work feels complete while leaving room for the viewer.
Finish and document
Each original is varnished, signed, and professionally photographed before leaving the studio. Originals come with a certificate of authenticity and care instructions.
Exhibitions
Work with Brooke
Available for commissions, corporate art projects, and tattoo bookings.
The B Chanelle Art Club
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