Bobbie Burgers

Contemporary painter, Bobbie Burgers was born in 1973 in Vancouver, British Columbia. She studied at the University of Aix-en-Provence, France and returns there often to capture the light and the vivid colors found in her paintings. She received a B.A. in Art History from the University of Victoria in 1996. Subsequently, she studied painting at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver.

“Over the past couple of years, my florals have moved from being portraits of flowers, to being portraits of time. In them, past, present and future play out for me simultaneously. Painting flowers can’t only be what meets the eye at one finite moment. I feel my works have to combine the light, the movement, the perfume, the emotions, the path this send us on, lack of focus, the opening and closing in fresh cool air … The list can go on indefinitely. I love painting flowers for their ability to encapsulate life, death and renewal. Theses blossoms have a history, they are combining past, present, future, dreams and realities into one final vision, which I hope expresses my wonder of the natural word.” Bobbie Burgers

“Flowers are a base, a starting point, a color, a season, something to cling to when facing the void. From here I reduce them to color and form in order to lo lay bare the myriad of emotions, love, rage, sorrow, that are driving the work” Bobbie Burgers

“As the paintings started to emerge and the show began to take form, I began to wonder how these works were fitting together and how I was seeing them as a group, where I was going. I sat down with an old friend and we talked. I told her that I saw these works as if one were constantly refocusing, in / out, close / far, cropping / adding, adjusting the lens. I could see how ones eyes would dart around trying to take in the whole. A story can be told from many different angles and points of view, and it is not until the book comes to close that the reader sees the bigger picture. My friend, being a lover of words and all thing literary, pointed out that this concept reminded her of the word metonymy – “the substitution of a word referring to an attribute for the thing that is meant”. As a creative process, menonymy pursued yields – “the articulation of the whole through an accretion of attributes”.

Here we had a delicious bit of post-rationalization, but it did seem to fit what I had been feeling while painting all those weeks. I had been trying to capture that creative process where one’s mind flits about in a beehive of activity, brainstorming. It is a constant refocusing, removing of excess, adding on, looking closer, and then standing back. In this whirlwind, this dizzying process, the mind come to rest, like a butterfly finally coming to pause on a flower. Peace. All the pars click together they re-member, and there is a blissful moment of contentment and understanding. In that moment the still life sits, the dialogue has ended and there is closure.” Bobbie Burgers