JB: When you started figurative painting, did you always know that was the direction you wanted to take with your art?
MB: When I started painting for real, in middle and high school, it was always figurative and portraiture. There was actually a little scandal because I painted a nude woman in high school under a bedsheet. It wasn’t anything crazy, but, you know. I don’t know if my brain is just fried from all the content I’ve taken in over my life, because I just don’t find anything offensive visually. At all. Sometimes I get so confused because I’ll make something and people will be really upset, and I’ll be like “Wait, what?”
JB: Like your “Hail Mary” painting. I saw a few hate comments on that.
MB: Totally! And on Twitter, too! That’s happened to me before where people get really upset, and I just have to take a step back. I think that’s part of the process of making art - you have to let go of it because it’s always going to be received based on the viewer’s perceptions and what they’re bringing to it. You want people to like your work and you don’t want people to say bad things about it! Or at least I do. I know some people like to be controversial but that’s never been my thing.
Anyways, when I started oil painting in college, I got to do my first series that was informed by my own interests. I found a bunch of pictures of strippers, because I wanted to paint the nude body. That’s what I was interested in learning how to do and refining my skills. I found pictures online and that’s what I based my first real body of work on. I wasn’t really thinking thematically back then, or communicating anything, I was just painting what I was interested in and it kind of evolved from there.
JB: I want to take you back to Oklahoma City. How has your upbringing there shaped your narrative as a painter now, and is there any imagery from that part of your life that has stuck with you?
MB: You can’t be somewhere and not be shaped by the environment and culture you’re in. A place like OK is so interesting because for so long, I felt like a big fish in a small pond, I felt so disconnected from everything else going on.
Now that I’m a little older, I see that it was the perfect place for me because it was such a safe environment and I got to see so much of the nuance. Growing up in OK, life was just simpler. Being in LA, and Dallas too, was such a culture shock for me because it feels so hyper materialistic in this way of luxury and lifestyle and who you are and status. OK has that in a different way, but it’s not as intense. I wasn’t as concerned with certain things.
MB (cont): Also, the feminine experience is so different in the Midwest and especially in OK. There’s a very diverse set of circumstances because there’s so many people who live a traditional, conservative life, and there are also people who go against the grain. You get to see a little of everything. But then you also have intense gossip and judgment on everything you do as a woman. Especially in smaller towns, Midwest lifestyle, church group gossip. No matter what you do, you’re getting talked about. In a big city, you don’t experience that in the same way. It creates this whole other realm of femininity in that your story and your experiences are always run in this lens of what everyone else is projecting onto you.
JB: For sure.
MB: That's a really big part of my work. You’re having these experiences and that's one level, and then the other level is what everyone else is projecting onto that experience.
JB: You say that you’re inspired by your own life, but how do you choose a narrative for each painting? What pushes you to choose one narrative over another or focus on one type of woman over another?
MB: Everything is so situational. When I’m working on a body of work, it’s reflective of where I am personally in my life. When I was younger, I was more salacious and I had more fun. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more reflective about adding depth and meaning behind it. It’s my personal experience, but the models themselves play a big part too. I’ll have an idea for a painting, and operating thematically, I’ll sit down and map out the themes I want to explore like the cycle of femininity in the house. I’ll start with the big picture and work down from there.
MB (cont): Once I’m ready to create a composition and pick a model, their energy and story affects how the painting comes to life. Since I take the photos, there’s some planning that goes into that. But it can create its own life once you’re in those situations with those people, and that can also impact the final piece and how it gets refined. It takes on its own life, and that’s what I love about it so much. I have these ideas and intentions, but I’m not living on an island. You have these other people that really influence how things turn out. It’s something that is always evolving. In part, it’s not just me. I’m co-creating with other forces.
JB: If you had to choose, which piece of yours feels the most like you, the piece you see the most of yourself in?
MB: It’s funny because when I think about my paintings, I always think about the past 6 months. Once I make a body of work, I get so over it and I’m like “Get it out of my mind”. But when I look back on the past year and my most recent body of work, I love “Nursing my Desires”.
MB (cont): One, because it’s really representative in scale of what I love to do. It’s something that has a really big impact visually. And also, in theme, because I really love that moment of, it feels vulnerable to me, and fully and completely delusional, and also a little fun and silly. It encapsulates all of those things that I love about making art and feel reflective of me as a person into one piece. And it’s just beautiful!
JB: I had a question about that painting because I saw you had a poem that you had written based on it. I saw that you also were a writer. How do those various mediums of yourself, your writing and your painting, interact to create a beautiful story?
MB: I’ll say I’m a writer, but I don’t really consider myself a writer. It’s all just this stream of consciousness and I’m just jotting down whatever is coming into my head. It helps to give more structure to the visuals for me, because it gets kind of a mess up here in my head sometimes. In that sense, I think the writing can inform the art and the art can inform the writing. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
Sometimes I’ll have something that I write that feels very visceral, and I’m like “Okay, I want to make this into a painting” and sometimes I’ll make a painting and it will feel like “This really needs something to guide the viewer into what point I’m trying to make”. But writing is weird because I always feel this weird insecurity about it where I don’t feel that proud of my skill set. So I’m always very squeamish about it, even talking about it. Even when you said “my poem”, I got itchy!
JB: Your writing feels very dynamic and playful, especially with your captions. How do you create that balance between having the art make such a statement and having that little aspect where it’s still playful?
MB: I just don’t take myself that seriously. It’s such a hard balance, because obviously I want to be taken seriously in some sense as an artist, but at the same time, I’m just a girl making paintings. I think approaching things with that attitude makes things easier and more fun. So I just try to remind myself, “Just keep being yourself”. It’s taken you this far, and will hopefully continue to take me down the road.
JB: Do you feel like you make your art for the little girl that you once were or for the woman that you want to become? Maybe a little bit of both?
MB: I think it’s both. I hope people see that they can live a life where you can make art and create without worrying about what everyone thinks. At the end of the day, it’s going to connect with someone and that’s what matters. When I was younger, it was hard to imagine that there was a world in which someone could just be a full career artist, especially because my grandma who was an artist was also an attorney. That wasn’t in my sphere of understanding.
For all of the cons of the internet and social media, it’s cool to see that there are people who can have careers doing what they love. I wish I had that as a little kid, someone I could look up to saying “You can just do this. You can do this thing you love and live your life”. That is a lot of what drives me to make my work. There was a time in my life where I didn’t think this was possible. Everyday I get to do it, I’m just so grateful. We all have a story, we all have something to say. I hope that people will see they have something valuable to say no matter what it is and they feel more comfortable expressing themselves.
JB: As a painter who paints mostly other people, what makes you feel the sexiest and how do you give the beauty back to yourself?
MB: I have some paintings of myself that live in my studio. It’s kind of a cathartic experience to make something that feels so deeply personal that it is just for me. It’s not for anyone else. I love that, and I do love painting myself. There’s something about when you remove that wall of seeing yourself, like visually in a mirror. We spend so much time looking at ourselves. To take that and make something beautiful out of it, completely changes the way you experience yourself. You’re thinking about lines and softness and colors and all of these things that don’t have this value judgment of “this is a good or bad feature”. You’re just trying to make something beautiful out of what’s in front of you, and that experience makes you feel so good about yourself.
JB: What does the future look like for you and your art, and if you could give us any speculation on the future of the art world in general, we’d love to hear as well.
MB: Every year I just come home more to myself truly. I feel softer and more relaxed; my work becomes more and more of a reflection of that.
In terms of the art world, there are so many artists creating from this sense of soul, you can feel them and it’s such a beautiful experience. More and more as the general world moves towards this reproductive, AI, capitalist hellscape, I think it becomes even more important to return to who you are and your experiences. You know when you’re having a panic attack and it’s like “What you can see and touch and smell”? What’s in front of you and around you becomes more and more crucial for all of us. Sometimes it’s easy to feel disillusioned looking around our world because what is going on here? But the power of art and experience will always ring true no matter what… that’s what I keep telling myself.
THANK YOU MACK!