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Volume 5 Interview with Nolina Burge
Fine Art
Q What term student are you at Art Center ?
N 7th term. I still have two terms to go before I graduate. I have had many traditional drawing/painting classes but next term I have a lot of different classes: photo, video and film, Photoshop, illustration workshop and independent study.
Q Have you experimented in with the electronic side of fine art and illustration?
N No.
Q Does that appeal to you ?
N Yes it does. The way I work anything I make looks like I made it. It is not like I vary so much. People get pushed into a certain way of doing some thing . I could never paint in that 'Art Center Style'. The work always looks like my paintings. I used to not like that but now I do. It is a little different.
Q Your work has such a painterly quality about it; as it begins to change medium it will be interesting to see what happens.
N Well I do not think that I am that good a painter. I can paint but I am not like some people that can paint so good. Everything they paint is good but I can paint certain things well.
Q I think you are being modest.
N Let me tell you about my name. This is what I am named after. It is the Nolina Plant. My dad is a biology teacher so he...
Q Is this the Huntington Gardens?
N Yes I looked it up there, they have a lot of varieties of it. It is not that beautiful. Its from the California desert, its a desert plant.
Q Are you from California?
N Yes, so it suites me. I think. I like the name. I like having a different name.
Q The dangers of having a biology teacher as a father is they have all these exotic names to draw from.
N It has been great. We would go on these camping trips and we were outside a lot and learned a lot of things. The names of plants, ( laughs) so it has been good.
In high school ,I really liked science and art. So I thought about going into Science but I am glad that I didn't. I started at Orange Coast College for a year and then when to Questa College in San Luis Obispo and then I went to Italy for a year to study art history.
Q Which part of Italy?
N Florence.
Q That is not a bad place for a painter.
N No, but I did not paint there. I just studied art . We went on field trips to Rome and Venice, really all over the place. It was through the Cal State Fullerton abroad program. When I came back I studied two years at Cal State Fullerton and then came here to this program.
Q Do you think that the camping trips, the experiences with your family and your travel has affected your 'eye' for landscape painting?
N When I really started painting these landscapes was when I was living up in Altadena, and there are so many trees up there, my place was surrounded by trees and I was looking for something that I could use in different ways, like an icon, something that could be used in very different ways.
I did these three little paintings and I put them aside for a while put everyone really liked them. I really liked them. They had the feeling of a lot of empty space, a bit of history to them. But at the same time I framed them with a white border so you could not tell if they were a photo or a painting.
I set them aside for awhile and continued to work on other things for school. Then I came back to them and came back to painting trees and kept working on them. Then when I had other types of assignments I would use trees for them. It was nice to have that continuity.
Q Do you usually paint in series? Three panels or multiples?
N I like to do that. I think it is more interesting to see variety within a certain type. Plus I am more interested with the space. The space between the sky and the canopy of the trees.
I once took a series of Polaroids of just the sky and I arranged them in a grid. I really like the Polaroid because it gives it a weird, beautiful look. I do take a lot of Polaroids, just walking around like these...these are mistakes but I really like this.
I painted this series of landscapes...well they are not really landscapes because they are only the very tops of the trees and sky, and I gave one to everyone in my class. I made them wallet size so they could put it in their wallet.
They are small oils which may not be the best. I would do it in acrylic now. It is just more durable.
Q Oils just cant hold up in someone's wallet. (laughs)
N Well they are sticky. And I put varnish on them... I told every one to really let them dry...
Q How do you make the decision about medium?
N Mostly I work in oil because it is the easiest to get the results that I am looking for. Acrylic is much harder to blend colors. But I work in charcoal and I have done print making, Xerox transfer and etching. I like all kinds of things.
I like when there is a sense of history in my work. Tradition in a way. I have been influenced a lot by my grandparents and being an art history major.
Q It is interesting to see a traditional family portrait developed in an untraditional medium of Xerox transfer.
N I like these colors, they are not mine but I am drawn to them.
Q When you lay out a set of images like this do you conceive it as a complete impression? Is the position of the upper picture relative to the lower one?
N I try to make little relationships between the ones next to each other and then all together as a whole composition. But this one may not really relate to that one.
Q It is not as though there were a white wall and you cut out small 'windows' to see a whole landscape beyond.
N Oh, no, no. There are bits of scenes.
It does look like holes in a wall though.
Q Yes, the lack of frame and the very small size of the image and the large number of them creates that impression. I think a large canvas would make more of a space of its own, but this collection over a wall space equal to that of a classic big landscape canvas creates a image that is stronger in the mind than in the eye. There is not 'A Subject' per say.
N Yes, I like that feeling. You do not know what they are. You create your own image. I am influenced by Gerhard Richter's paintings from photographs.
I like this area here in this photo and that area there in another photo and I am interested in interpreting this image into that to offer a new image.
It has a lot to do with living in LA. We see bits of tree and we are not overwhelmed by the buildings. I think that we could be if we do not take the time to look at these spaces and enjoy them when we see them. When I am driving around I like to see these little spaces that people may not notice an enjoy them and represent them in different ways. This is the way I see things. The Thrifty Wash, this color here, this bit of tree, this section of sky, it is something you see every day and may not think that it is beautiful.
Q Yes, it is as if you could imagine driving down Sunset Blvd. and if you can frame that vista in a particular way ... in a way the white wall...
N Is every thing taken away. Yes
Q Yes. But it is not done as a story board.
N It is more fragmented.Have you seen Uta Barth? She influenced me a lot. She makes large beautiful photographs with such a calm feeling an absence, a bit of drape or part of a lamp really with almost nothing in them.
Ed Ruscha, I like his work a lot. This has a lot to do with his work. Have you ever seen his movie? I loved that movie. So I think you can see a lot of those ideas in my work. I was working on these paintings and then I saw the movie and it was very nice to have that confirmation.
The other influence on this work was my grandfather, who was an architect who just passed a way, so I dedicated this work to him. He did not like sky scrapers, he did not even like two story buildings, just one story with trees all around. He was a great teacher.
Q At times the intense calmness of the picture looks almost 'Florentine' its so dense.
N Some times I paint the backgrounds of 'Paintings' in fact some of these pictures in the portfolio are studies from the backgrounds of well known pictures. Fragments.... this etching of a palm is taken from an old picture from Egypt and it seems old. I like that sense of history to be present in the new work.
Q So what is next?
N Vacation.... I am going to New York then back to classes.
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