[2] A self-taught polymath (the first in Canadian art),[3] in addition to being a visual artist, Brooker was a Governor General's Award-winning novelist, as well as a poet, screenwriter, playwright, essayist, copywriter, graphic designer, and advertising executive.

[4] Brooker's success at writing for films and local theatre inspired him to pursue journalism and newspaper layout design in Neepawa and then back in Portage la Prairie.

The Brookers' modest Glenview Avenue house in the middle-class neighbourhood of Lawrence Park became a meeting place for creative individuals, including the conductor Ernest MacMillan and the artists Charles Comfort, Paraskeva Clark, and Kathleen Munn.

[13] Around 1922 to 1924 Brooker began working on a series of non-objective paintings inspired by a profoundly mystical experience during a visit to the Presbyterian church in Dwight at the Lake of Bays in Ontario around 1921.

[4] Brooker began painting in an abstract style, and in 1927 held his first exhibition, sponsored by his friends Lawren Harris and Arthur Lismer[12] at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto.

[15] 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).

Brooker's first abstracts are influenced by the English group's use of precisely defined geometrical forms in aggressive contortions and highly saturated hues.

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.

[19] In 2024 the McMichael Canadian Art Collection organized a retrospective curated by Michael Parke-Taylor, titled "Bertram Brooker: When We Awake!