Bobbie Burgers: The Lure of Magical Thinking at Bau-Xi Gallery (3045 Granville St.) until Dec. 24. For more information visit bau-xi.com.
The idea is at the back of her mind but it won't stay there.
It's getting stronger, pulsing and repeating, threatening to swim through the artist's mind and into the acrylic she's splashing over her canvas. Over hours and hours of painting, the idea always wins.
"In my painting, even if I'm trying to be very loose and free, there's still an underlying form that I need," explains West Vancouver artist Bobbie Burgers. Burgers speaks to the North Shore News while getting ready to unveil
her newest exhibit, The Lure of Magical Thinking at the Bau-Xi Gallery on Granville Street in Vancouver.
Whether magical thinking manifests in crossed fingers or seeing a connection between the cracks in the sidewalk and your mother's spine, it's something we're supposed to grow out of.
Burgers ruminated on childlike play and the draw of leaping over logic as she painted the dying anemones and bleeding roses of her newest collection.
"There is no meaning and there's no structure," she says of the way young children play. "It's more just about pure expression and experimentation and the thrill of that."
Burgers recalls a similar thrill in creating her first paintings. "It's almost like, 'Look what I can do! Oh my god!' You surprise yourself all over the place," she explains.
But as experience piles up that initial thrill is muted.
The new exhibit is Burgers coming "full circle" to magical thinking.
After 18 years with a brush in her hand, Burgers says she's expressing herself better than ever, able to translate emotions, "not with ease but with assurance."
"Only now, in the last couple of years and especially with this show, do I feel like Pandora's box has opened and there's all these possibilities out there." One of those possibilities is the three-dimensional works that help populate The Lure of Magical Thinking.
Besides being more monochromatic than her previous showcases, the exhibit is highly thematic.
In her artist statement, Burgers discusses balancing experience with magical thinking by "examining flowers on the precipice of decline."
While some artist focus on young buds and The Rolling Stones were taken with Dead Flowers, Burgers looks at flowers that have just begun to slump and slacken.
Choosing dying flowers is a way for Burgers to break barriers, she explains. Female artists often bear a stereotype and female artists who paint flowers tend to labour under even more restrictive stereotypes. "I really want to break through and show them in a different way," she says of her flowers. "They're not something pretty and refined and calm and sweet. I want them to be larger than life and show a lot of energy and wind and movement." To get that effect, Burgers employs brushstrokes that border on aggressive with a brush
as wide as her hand.
When she was at the easel 10 years ago her biggest brush was the width of her thumb. "My whole way of painting has completely changed," she says. "It keeps the work fresh." Burgers' work is largely about maintaining her sense of wonder and discovery while secluded in her West Vancouver studio.
The canvasses often nudge the studio's low roof but floor to ceiling windows allow a view of a "private Zen courtyard" replete with fig and quince trees.
"You have to go into a different dimension," she explains. "If anybody's
atching or near me, I become a different person, I don't go into that space."
Solitude is as essential for Burgers today as it was when she dropped out of a painting course at the University of Victoria nearly 20 years ago.
"Being surrounded by other people's opinions and thoughts, whether they're good or bad, would affect me," she explains. "Even when I go and I see work that I truly love and admire I can only be around it for a very short period of time."
While it might be nice to be more involved in the art community, Burgers has no plans to step away from her enclave.
"I like being in bubbles."
