February Featured Artist - Brigitte Charlotte

By Kris Leigh Townsend

Who are you and what do you do?

I am an emerging fine artist, primarily an oils painter, living in Culver City. I have my bachelors in fine arts from Loyola Marymount and will be spending this next year getting a portfolio together to apply for my MFA. 

What are five words to describe you/your art?

Empathetic, perceptive, progressive, energetic, heightened 

What is your creative process like?

My creative process has been taking a huge shift as of late. Being a mom of a young child as well as a working artist, forces me to be very disciplined. My practice used to revolve around inspiration, which to a degree, it still does, but now it has a very strict schedule. When my son’s at school and after he’s in bed are basically my allotted hours to create. This has taught me to call forth flow and inspiration whenever I need it. I’ve also been figuring out how to shift into a more sustainable practice. With the current climate crisis and polarized political state, I just don’t feel like I can sit back any longer and remain complacent. I want to be more mindful about the carbon footprint I’m leaving behind with my art work as well as very mindful of the materials that I’m using. I’m also transitioning into a more social active practice with my art and am feeling very energized to use art as a catalyst for change. 

What drives you to make art?

There are a lot of internal forces at play that drive me to create. It’s almost like an urgent compulsion to create with my hands while simultaneously having a very active mind that also needs a release. 

The current state of affairs are also a huge driving factor, which is guiding my shift in the studio and my current body of work.  

The incentive to make the world a better place for the next generation, which becomes increasingly apparent and realistic being that I have a 5 year old, has catapulted me into this new phase. 

How do you stay inspired?

For me, gaining new knowledge and having new experiences is the key ingredients for inspiration. I keep taking courses at Santa Monica College to expose me to new information that then sparks ideas. For example, I was quite interested in exploring more environmental conscious themes in my work and knowing that it’s such a complex topic, I wanted to learn from a knowledgeable source. It prompted me to take a semester long course called “Environmental Psychology” and I am taking an “Environmental Ethics” course next semester. I love conducting research and need a deep understanding of whatever topics I’m exploring in order to feel comfortable creating artwork about it. For me, knowledge keeps me inspired.

Entering the world of my child is another doorway to magic that keeps me creating. Seeing through the eyes of my child helps me see the beauty in the most mundane things. 

What message do you want to send through your business or art?

My main goal is to make the invisible visible. To take complex information and visually depict it in a manner that is compelling, evocative, and makes the viewer engage in thoughtful self-reflection. I think sometimes we tend to lose sight of our places in the world and our individual paths. I want to make art that enables people to confront existential issues and find their own expressions. 

What difficult experiences have you faced professionally/creatively?

One thing I often fail to acknowledge in conversations and previous interviews is the entanglement in my life of being a mother as well as an artist. I think I was fearful of the stigma of mother artists, or I had this false preconceived notion that people wouldn’t take me as seriously if they knew that part of my identity. I’m trying to rewrite the narrative and bring attention to something that I and many other artists face. I think the most difficult part, for me personally, is balancing motherhood and my artistic career. In a male dominated field of fine arts, being a female artist that also has a child is quite difficult. It is not easy being pulled between two entities that need my constant nurturing and love; my son, and my art. They both require so much from me, and I’m honestly exhausted at the end of each day. But while being depleted on a physical level, my soul and heart is completely filled up on life and love from the two. From being able to be a present figure for my son and an emerging artist, I am grateful. It’s surely a difficult balance, but I wouldn’t change it for anything. I think learning how to let myself go in the studio and dissapear into my imagination, and then having to abruptly shift out of that and re-ground myself, to shift into a strong present mom for my son when it's time go get him from school has been the most challenging part for me of learning the balance. The state i'm in when i'm in the studio, is not necesarrily conducive to motherhood. I feel very lofty and unhindered and unbridled and somewhat selfish when i'm creating art. I'm tending to my needs and that of my art only. But my mother-self is one of routine, structure, groundedness, compassion, and selflessness when i'm engaging with my son, as kids need their parent to be a rock. So finding out how to easily transition between those states as I wake up and get my son breakfast and ready for school, and then I head to the studio to do artwork for 8 hours, and then back to pick my son up, and then we have our evening and night together, then he goes to bed, and it's back to the studio and creating; it's a lot of shifinting in and out of different states throughout the day. 

What's next for you?

This year is going to be crazy. I am making big shifts from taking what was once a more illustrative representational and sometimes surreal body of work into a deeper more meaningful, conceptual form. I was trained in a very traditional manner, but am breaking out of my comfort zone and focusing more on the ideas at play and then figuring out the best artistic medium conducive for those ideas. The artwork I made once aligned more with "visionary art", as the transformational festival scene was a subculture that I was deeply involved in. I do not think that artwork necessarily is authentic to the place I am in my life now. So the once overtly psychedlic art I was making is transforming into a more conceptual refined route that has more tranquility and calm and insight in it than the pieces I was exploring pre-motherhood. 

Do you have any upcoming projects, events or shows? (So we can let the people know!)

At the moment, I have taken a pause on showing. I think mainly because I’m in the middle of this existential crisis within my artwork. My identity as an artist and what that meant and the themes I am exploring is currently significantly shifting. And I’m not quite ready to debut this transformation and shift to the outside because I’m still very much in the thick of it, unraveling the threads of the ideas, and letting it all unfold. I don’t want to interrupt that process by feeling the pressure of creating for people to see because that some times interferes with my ability to create. I can be most authentic when I feel like no one is watching, so I’m staying low right now until I’m at the point with the work that it feels ready to debut and have a conversation with others outside of myself. Right now, my conversation with my artwork is quite private.