Brooke Hunter-Lombardi is a multimedia artist and high school art teacher from Columbus, Ohio, whose family roots run deep in Appalachia. When she and her husband Steve were looking at residencies, Azule jumped out immediately, and it’s delivered everything she hoped for. This is their third time back.
Brooke came to paint and sculpt. Steve came to make music, fix things, and somewhere in between, record a song for a man he never met.
Watch the full conversation below.
“It helps you be who you want to be. It’s like being my best self.”
Brooke calls herself an ideas-based artist, meaning the materials follow whatever the concept demands. Painting, drawing, sculpture, clay. Whatever fits. She went to art college after choosing art over science, drawn to the sheer range of people she found there. Making things is where she feels most herself, and Azule has become a thread that connects her to that, even after she’s home.
Steve spent years in maintenance before leaving to care for his mother. When it was time for a vacation, Brooke found this place, and it reshaped them both. Camille puts him to work the moment he arrives, and that turns out to be the point. Steve spent years as a full-time caregiver before finding his way to Azule, and he and Camille share a vocabulary around that kind of devotion that doesn’t need translating. “Nothing really warms my heart more than fixing something that she couldn’t fix,” he says.
“The magic is you get more from giving than you do from taking. Once you learn that trick, you just want to keep giving.”
This visit, Brooke spread her paintings out across the studio, walked the creek, sketched plants and tadpoles, and let the land do its quiet work. Steve recorded in the music studio and finished a song called Drive Me There, built from things Dave used to say, layered over field recordings of crickets and frogs and Dave’s old Yamaha keyboard. It found its way to being something tender.
Brooke Hunter-Lombardi is a multimedia artist and high school art teacher based in Columbus, Ohio, whose work spans painting, drawing, and sculpture. Steve Lombardi is a musician from Columbus who contributes to Azule through ongoing work trade. This is their third residency at Azule.