Years ago, when Tom Brooks was sitting in stillness on the hills of Orvieto trying to capture their appearance on paper, he had his first inkling of something within what he was seeing. Yet, the concept of seeing within the landscape was then not grasped, for Brooks was keenly devoted to the academic of rendering appearance - realism. The Life Abstracted Collection is a series of paintings devoted to the elusive vision: a silent, inchoate accompaniment to the realism his academic education had taught him to recognize. In this dramatic contrast to his earlier work, these paintings set the viewer deep within the landscape: surrounded and encompassed by it, not merely observing it, coming from years of silent seeing.