Lauri Burke - 'Back Brain Process' - my creative process and naming my work...

 

Interesting question, and here is how I believe, from my experience, and from descriptions of other abstract artist’s work - if you are working on an illustration or a piece of realistic or even slightly abstract work ‘in plein air” where you are looking at something and creating it from a source the title is ez, e.g. “left bank of the Seine”, “portrait of Margaret”. In an illustration, you are working with what the text suggests, “blowing smoke rings at the moon”. So these types of works are fairly ez to name.

 

If however, you are working with a “back brain” wholly or partially abstract focus, it is a focus that first puts down, then refines, then refines, then refines and adds and adds and adds, by a process of “no, that must go there, now that needs to be a different shape, that part needs to be further refined with a fine black line line, because it is almost right, but not quite yet. And on this process goes until you look at the piece, and your back brain gives a signal, of, umpf, no more, that is it.

Maybe not “perfect” looking, but whatever you were working on synergistically with your unconscious has been brought forward into a whole that functions as art. There is usually emotional catharsis in the process. And also, a wildness that doesn’t belong, quite, with photographic realism in art.

 

Although all painting, sketching etc. has some of it - painting the realism of an open kitchen window in your house, you are translating reality through the artist’s vision, making it something “more”, a real site that has passed by a specific eye, heart, soul, mind. The mood of the artist is in the work.

 

You yourself do back brain work brilliantly with your photographic and mixed media collages, the way I do with my back brain work on illustration and paintings. What color, you ask yourself, how big, what shape, what scale in relation to the whole. The composite becomes a unique piece of art simply bursting with life!

In “The Artist Half-Dissolved in the 20th Century” painting I provided a soft background, changed it, changed it, changed it with back brain focus, until it looked “right”, then created a neutral ivory zone in the center. I knew I was working on a face somewhere in the piece, but who it would be I had no idea.

 

When I started to work on the upper body and face using my back brain approach, it began to look to me like I was conjuring an early 20th century artist, who had also perhaps worked in the late 19th century.

 

An open, loving, creative person changed by a changing world, able to embrace the new and move on from earlier, more literal work, as so many did, and had to do. So, from a 19th century frame of more rigid art, the work to come was ‘half-dissolved in the 20th century’, informed by the ethos of the new. Thus altering the artist too, because as we change perspectives, we change consciousness as well. Broadening, and making it more nimble. The positive side of education, different lenses to look through. More tools to work with.

 

I am working on finding my metier in art, in writing we call it a voice. I have the real world and a vast catalog of art from which to choose for inspiration. But, in the end, it is never strong art until it incorporates your own vision. So the process of painting that picture was cathartic and revelatory to me in searching for vision and synthesis in my own art. In back brain directed art work, as in dreams, your unconscious “informs” your conscious brain of what you already know, you just don’t “know it” on a conscious level. When the work is completed, the title comes.