Atlanta-based artist Amani Brooker paints vividly colorful portraits and dream-like landscapes

On the “City Lights” series “Speaking of Art,” local artists share insights into their influences, processes and experiences in town. Amani Brooker is an Atlanta-based painter. She specializes in gouache portraiture, with highly stylized, vividly colorful faces often floating in suspension, their features sometimes underlaid with dream-like landscapes.

One such portrait series currently in progress is called “Holding Space.”

“I find that in doing floating heads, it’s already giving that viewer that sense of just focusing on the mind,” said Brooker. “Within the shadows and the cast shadows of the face, I paint landscapes within them, and these landscapes usually have a sun or a moon that acts as another symbolic point of focus for meditation.”