Today we’d like to introduce you to Brigitte Johnston.
Brigitte, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
To be honest, I never imagined art was my future. As a child, I could say I was creative, but I loved just being outdoors. As a teen, I was a highly competitive gymnast as well as a math and science nerd. Those were my strengths, sports, and academics. It wouldn’t be until a sequence of traumatic experiences culminated in a mental breakdown in my early twenties, that my identity as an artist began to form.
Making art honestly was the only practice that persisted through this dark period in my life because it played a very therapeutic role in my healing process. Art grounded me in a period when my psyche and spirituality were in the process of reconstructing themselves.
In painting, for example, I could be as incredibly intimate and exposed as I please, while still being able to protect myself and hide within the canvas. This paradoxical role that my artwork played gave me authority over my mental anguish. Because my being was recorded on the canvas, I could look back on it when I was ready to more deeply understand my experience from an objective perspective.
I think that’s what led to my initial body of work being so inwardly focused; creating was a direct tool for catharsis. I could get lost for hours in the expanse of my mind and escape, while also healing the trauma I had experienced. My artistic practice is one that has liberated me from myself.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
I don’t think anyone’s journey is smooth. I’ve always held onto the Buddhist idea of “Dukkha” which can be translated to “suffering” or “pain.” Suffering is an integral part of the human condition, and I would say the biggest challenge and also the biggest accomplishment would be overcoming and managing my mental health issues.
It took an immense amount of discipline, will, self-reflection, lifestyle changes, and therapy to get beyond that period. I think it can be dangerous to stereotype artists as tortured souls and to revere the idea that mental illness and creativity go hand and hand, but for me, it was my catalyst to a huge creative outpour.
I think one of the most difficult steps in my artistic process was no longer using my extreme emotional states to guide my practice, and I thought I would never be able to create again after gaining stability.
So reliant on my sickness to create, I didn’t know who I was without it. I had to work hard and go deeper in myself, beyond just the suffering, really to begin creating authentic work that felt meaningful and powerful that wasn’t centered around trauma. It was a huge transition for me in my artistic practice.
It’s not to say that I’m immune from the ebbs and flows of life but that I have a toolbox of coping mechanisms to confront and ease challenging periods. Where art once needed to play this role in my life, art could now be so much more. Art has been my constant, and I very much have a love/hate relationship with it.
There are days when I have crippling self-doubt that impedes my ability to create, but then after a period of rumination, I’m able to fully express myself with confidence and almost urgency. In the final analysis, what I do know is that I will always need to create and paint.
We’d love to hear more about what you do.
I am an emerging fine artist in Culver City. I am known for my pop surreal paintings that often have an underlying “trippy” nature. I take my training in representational work and then distort it leaving my audience with a sense of this reality but also otherworldly ideas.
My compositions vary in content but often explore similar themes in identity and spirituality, as well as feminism and psychology. I often begin with an image that may not itself evoke anything out of the norm, but by the time I have finished the piece, I can often only imagine it having a transcendental existence.
These themes allow my work to remain personal while being relatable to an audience that might not know me beyond the painting itself. I feel that I’m very versatile, both thematically and stylistically. My voice as an artist is always changing and shifting. I’m beginning to step into more of a fine art realm that feels authentic to who I am.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
My most recent artwork has been an exploration of the ideas rather than the imagery used to articulate them. I have recently been experimenting with making paintings using magnets and ferrous materials to speak about attachment theory. The creation of this painting did not revolve around trying to represent an image of something as abstract as “attachment theory.”
This recent body of work does not depict metaphysical subjects but is rather itself an object that requires something beyond our physical reality to actually exist, namely the relationship between the piece itself and its audience. I’ve also been exploring the medium of paint itself and the marks it can make and viscosity of the medium in some large scale abstract pieces.
These pieces, being new experiments, are still something that I have yet to showcase and bring out into the world, but look forward to debuting this new body of work after I’ve dived deeper into the meaning behind it. I’m also excited about an intertextuality project I just completed emphasizing political satire.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.brigitte-charlotte.com/
- Email: brigitte.charlotte@ymail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brigitte_charlotte/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Brigitte.Charlotte.Johnston/
Image Credit:
Jack X Proctor
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