to the Presbyterian church in Dwight at the Lake of Bays in Ontario in 1923. This mystical experience reinforced his spiritualism and motivated him to attempt to render the mystical in art. Brooker began painting in an abstract style, and in 1927 held his first exhibition, organized by his friend Lawren Harris. That year his work was on display at the Canadian National Exhibition. He was one of the first Canadians to paint in this style, although Kathleen Munn exhibited abstract paintings before Brooker exhibited his. Later, he was influenced in his development as an artist by LeMoine FitzGerald. Brooker's first set of abstracts, from 1922 to 1924, and later works such as Ascending Forms, c.1929, appear to be inspired by the Vorticist paintings of Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), David Bomberg (1890–1957), William Roberts (1895–1980), and Helen Saunders (1885–1963). The art of this group, particularly that of Lewis, used abstraction in sharp-edged lines to denote movement in a violent, slashing way. Brooker's first abstracts are influenced by the English group's use of precisely defined geometrical forms in aggressive contortions and highly saturated hues. Although Brooker imitated Vorticist and Futurist forms, he was by no means a proponent of the politics of those movements. After meeting Winnipeg-born painter and printmaker, Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, in 1929, Brooker undertook a major stylistic change, in accordance with his new friend's practice, and began to mingle naturalist and abstract elements in his work. Although he sometimes returned to pure abstraction and sometimes ventured into paintings that were essentially representational, much of his work from 1930 until the end of his life was a playful mixture of these two modes. The conjoining of two styles became the mark of his work after 1930. In 1923 he joined the staff of the J.J. Gibbons Advertising Agency. In 1931 Brooker was embroiled in a controversy about nudity in art when a painting of his was removed from a gallery exhibition because it contained nudity. Brooker later wrote the essay "Nudes and Prudes" in 1931 as a rebuke. In 1936, Brooker's novel Think of the Earth (1936) became the first work to win the Governor General's Award for Fiction, although very few copies were sold. In 1940 he joined the staff of the MacLaren Advertising Co. He was elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy and the Ontario Society of Artists. He was a founding member of the Canadian