Photo: Kyle paints during Parklife in Piedmont Park on Oct. 18, 2015. Photo by Branden Camp

Resisting conformity

Five years later, Kyle and I strolled into his favorite Thai restaurant where he greeted the waitress by name.

Tall and slim with extra-long arms, Kyle sat hunched forward as though he was perpetually cold. He wore white overalls covered in pastel paint splatters, a handkerchief tied around his neck like an ascot. At the next table, two muscular police officers sized us up. Perhaps it was Kyle’s colorful presence that caught their eyes, or maybe it was his epic beard, a bright red tumble of whiskers that ended at a point a foot below his chin.

“I was born in Columbus, Ohio,” he tells me between bites of his vegetarian basil and rice dish, “but the Brooks are a long line of Georgians.”

His family moved to Atlanta before Kyle was out of diapers. He attended Mt. Carmel Christian School in Stone Mountain from kindergarten until seventh grade. He spoke of those years with reverence. It was a good childhood.

That changed in eighth grade, when Brooks enrolled at Stockbridge Junior High. He likened his first days there to being “the newest convict in the prison yard.”

He was horrified at the way kids treated one another, and for the first time in his life he got into a fight.

Realizing the social stakes, Brooks conformed as much as he could. But he entertained himself by writing silly poems for friends and doodling strange beasts onto the backs of tests and quizzes. He loved to get a laugh. His imaginative flights of fancy helped him pass the time and eventually gained him social entrée. The girls loved his artful ways, and his chill demeanor won over most of the guys, even his would-be bullies.

But by his senior year, Kyle was lost. His parents assumed he would attend their alma mater Milligan College, a private Christian liberal arts college near Johnson City, Tenn., but Kyle didn’t want to go. Instead of talking about it with his parents, he quietly slipped unnoticed into June without applying.

When they found out, they were angry and disappointed. Family pressure redoubled, and Kyle eventually acquiesced. He didn’t have a better plan for his life, anyway. Hasty arrangements were made to get him in Milligan. Brooks lasted two years.

“Safe to say, no art got made,” Kyle said, as we left the restaurant.

Photo: Kyle poses with "Faces", his mural on Eastside Trail under North Highland Ave. in June 2015. Photo by Jenni Girtman.

Corporate connections

Today Kyle and Maria live in a house in Lithonia; his studio is in the detached garage. Most of his work these days are commissioned paintings for major corporations.

“Here lately, I’ve been doing mostly corporate work, which has its benefits,” he said. “Like when I painted some stuff at the Shaky Knees Festival and they gave me these fancy VIP tickets, and I got to eat with famous people. That was kind of fun.”

Kyle came to work with so many of Atlanta’s high-profile organizations because he did a job for free, for the Atlanta Resource Foundation. That work led to other commissions, including one for the Atlanta Falcons.

“I was painting a big, long wall with animals and things. Then this big bus shows up with some of the team,” Kyle recalled. “Mike Smith, who was coaching then, came in and he was painting with me, and I had him up on a ladder. And then, lo and behold, here comes Arthur Blank. And then I was embarrassed because I had bought my paint from Lowe’s that day and here’s the guy that owned Home Depot. I think Maria covered up all the labels with paint.”

Much of the corporate work he’s done “daisy-chained like that,” he said. One organization connecting him to another. Nowhere is the daisy chain more visible in Kyle’s life than the one connecting him to the man who snatched up his painting on Ponce de Leon Avenue, Bryan Schroeder with the Georgia Conservancy.

Bryan eventually discovered who painted the door. He found Kyle’s website and read the post about the door on his blog.

“I was so wracked with guilt about it, I don’t think I reached out to Kyle about it for a year or two,” Bryan recalled.

When the two eventually did connect, Bryan knew he wanted Kyle involved with Georgia Conservancy. One of the things Bryan did for the nonprofit was develop a robust program of trips designed to expose people to the state’s natural beauty. So he took Kyle on a couple of trips and invited him to create artwork for Firelight, the organization’s largest fund-raising event for the trips program.

The Firelight commission led to a commission for Sweetwater Brewery, which led to a commission for Xerox, which brought him to the attention of the Bitter Southerner online magazine. The Bitter Southerner made a video about Kyle, and that resulted in commissions at the Weather Channel and MailChimp, which introduced him to a half-dozen advertising agencies.

All of that and more came about because Bryan Schroeder saw a painting on a door in an alley and just had to have it.

Kyle might have been lost until he was nearly 30 years old, but by embracing his passion and putting his work out in the world when the time felt right, he has made a name for himself he couldn’t have imagined the day he first tacked a bear head to a telephone pole.

“Nowadays the thing is, I can’t always say yes,” Kyle said about his growing work load. “It’s funny to turn work down, because if you had told me five years later I’d be sitting here talking for this story in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, man…” Kyle trailed off before regaining his thought. “I guess the moral of the story is just to go for it. Try some stuff. The world will work it out with you.”