My Homage to Bobbie Burgers
One of our required art projects this year was to complete an homage to a contemporary artist. I chose to do Bobbie Burgers, a local artist.
Bobbie Burgers is a West Vancouver-based artist whose main subject is flowers.
From her website: "She is interested in the process of decay, transformation, and metamorphosis. With a distinct style that merges abstraction with representation in increasing degrees, her work brings together instinctive compositions while revealing her precise powers of observation. Remarkable for their compositional rhythms, bold coloration, and sweeping gestural brushstrokes, Burgers’ paintings bring alive the fundamental quest to express something personal, subjective and emotive, in a poetic, abstract way."
What inspired me to pick her was the mentality behind her paintings. Originally, she painted very detailed and realistic paintings of flowers. Then, she realized that still, life is never really still, as life is constantly affecting it. So she ditched any reference images and just let the brush flow on the canvas.
As someone who paints with a lot of preparation and structure, I wanted to try her art style without references.
In the Beginning...
Now, my idea was to a portrait of a non-specific person from memory because portraits to me are what flowers are to Bobbie Burgers. Something we both paint a lot and enjoy doing.
Every step was okay but it was just that. Okay. I never truly liked any of the paintings made in the process enough to say that's it. I only liked one painting, which is the first painting that got colorful (I will show just that one later). It got to the point where I just painted the entire canvass white and scratched a face into it. Still, I didn't like it. So, feeling down about the work, I asked my art teacher for her opinion and she suggested I asked for public opinion. Which I did! I sent up a paper and pen beside the painting on display and asked "is this finished?"
I got some really good advice. Along with some weird comments. But the overall theme was that it needed more color and I agreed. Although Bobbie Burgers uses muted and neutral colors, I felt that in my own personal art style, this piece was meant to be down in colors.
Due to this, and how many times the canvas had been painted over, I knew I needed to start fresh. To also take a break from working on canvas, I decided to try painting on primed paper.
My Process
The one thing I learned from the beginning process was my color scheme. For the portrait I liked the most, I wanted to keep the color I had used. A mix of vibrant blues, reds, and purples, with hints of green and yellow.
I also took inspiration from this painting by Bobbie Burgers called "Velocity". I wanted to mimic her painting style within this piece. The more watered down paint strokes in the background versus the thicker board strokes outlining the petals on top. Also, the thin lines of paint.
Layer 1
My first step was to mimic Bobbie Burger's more watercolor-like strokes of paint as the first layer. I took Artist Grade Acrylic Paint and mixed it with a lot of water. Using a wet square brush, I was able to also re-create her brushstroke. Curved lines flow across the page. Often, with multiple lines within one stroke.
For the recreation of the face, I drew a very rough outline of a face, from memory, with a graphite pencil. Then, I allowed myself to let go and paint where I felt the paint belonged. However, I did put certain colors where they would belong on a face. Like pink on the cheeks and darker colors in the contours of the face and neck.
Layer 2
For the next layer, I mixed less water into the paint and applied it with thicker strokes. Building up certain features of the face like the nose, lips, and chin. I continued with the color palette of blues, pinks, and purples. I also kept the largest square brush to create solid curved lines.
Layer 3
This is the final stage of my painting. Thus us where I took a smaller wet square brush and painted small thicker lines on the face. I added highlights with yellow, light pink, light blue, and white. Then, I took Posca paint pens in violet, light pink, and light blue to put thinner lines across the face. Mimicking, the thin lines in Bobbie Burger's paintings. For the background, I painted watered down separated sections of lines, using a large square brush. Then, when I found them too bright and overpowering, I painted over them with white. However, I didn't do it thick enough on purpose so a little of the paint from under would come through.