Since a very young age, Claire Burbridge has always considered herself an artist. Born and educated in Great Britain, she has been a prolific artist her entire life, working in sculpture early in her career. However, when she moved to the United States over 10 years ago, she was inspired to return to drawing using the natural world as subject. She now does exquisite, detailed pencil and ink drawings, inspired by the nature that surrounds her current home in southern Oregon. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, England and in Germany. Recent solo exhibitions include at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene, Oregon, Nancy Toomey Fine Art in San Francisco, California, and the Davis and Cline Art Gallery in Ashland, Oregon. She is the 2019 recipient of the Oregon Percent for Art Commission through Western Oregon University. Her latest foray is in creating wallpapers, once again inspired by nature.
For more information on Claire or to contact the artist, please visit www.claireburbridge.com.
To view and purchase her wallpapers, visit www.claireburbridge
I spoke to her in 2020 at her home in southern Oregon.
Music by Manpreet Kaur. @ManpreetKaurmusic
www.sacred-truths.com
Since a very young age, Claire Burbridge has always considered herself an artist. Born and educated in Great Britain, she has been a prolific artist her entire life, working in sculpture early in her career. However, when she moved to the United States over 10 years ago, she was inspired to return to drawing using the natural world as subject. She now does exquisite, detailed pencil and ink drawings, inspired by the nature that surrounds her current home in southern Oregon. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, England and in Germany. Recent solo exhibitions include at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene, Oregon, Nancy Toomey Fine Art in San Francisco, California, and the Davis and Cline Art Gallery in Ashland, Oregon. She is the 2019 recipient of the Oregon Percent for Art Commission through Western Oregon University. Her latest foray is in creating wallpapers, once again inspired by nature.
For more information on Claire or to contact the artist, please visit www.claireburbridge.com.
To view and purchase her wallpapers, visit www.claireburbridge
I spoke to her in 2020 at her home in southern Oregon.
Music by Manpreet Kaur. @ManpreetKaurmusic
www.sacred-truths.com
Claire Burbridge: The art I do now is completely concentrated on deep reverence for nature, because that’s what I feel, living here in Southern Oregon, living in the mountains, surrounded by this absolutely incredible nature, observing the seasons, the cycles of life. It’s the most inspiring thing, Emmy, and it’s a structure that I use to hang my practice because art is a practice in the deeper sense of the word. I use nature to hang my practice of art on, and it’s incredibly, incredibly satisfying and I can’t ever imagine coming to the end of it.
There’s never the thought in my head that I’m going to run out of ideas.
Emmy: Since a very young age, Claire Burbridge has always considered herself an artist. Born and educated in Great Britain, she has been a prolific artist her entire life, working in sculpture early in her career. However, when she moved to the United States over 10 years ago, she was inspired to return to drawing using the natural world as subject. She now does exquisite, detailed pencil and ink drawings, inspired by the nature that surrounds her current home in southern Oregon. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, England and in Germany. Recent solo exhibitions include at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene, Oregon, Nancy Toomey Fine Art in San Francisco, California, and the Davis and Cline Art Gallery in Ashland, Oregon. She is the 2019 recipient of the Oregon Percent for Art Commission through Western Oregon University. Her latest foray is in creating wallpapers, once again inspired by nature.
For more information on Claire or to contact the artist, please visit www.claireburbridge.com.
To view and purchase her wallpapers, visit www.claireburbridge.com
I spoke to her in 2020 at her home in southern Oregon
Emmy: Good morning, Claire, thank you for being with me today.
CB: It’s lovely to be with you today, Emmy.
Emmy: You were born in London and grew up in rural Scotland and England. You’ve always known that you wanted to be an artist. How did that desire express itself in your childhood?
CB: When I was young, almost immediately, I would say, I remembered a story. My mother was told I had artistic talent. I had chicken pox. A doctor came and he saw some drawings that were lying on the bed and he had asked who had done them and my mother said I had and he was really surprised because they were portraits and they had sort of eyelashes and nostrils, and not the normal way that a 3-year-old would be drawing. So, my mother, she suddenly understood that possibly that that was an interest or talent that she should nurture.
Emmy: You were doing portraits at age three? (laughs)
CB: Apparently. I honestly don’t have a personal memory of this. That was what I had been told my mother. Every birthday, Christmas, I was given lots of art materials.
My mother would always have pencils and things like that in her handbag, so maybe wherever we were waiting somewhere, she would always give me pencil, and paper, and I would say as a young child, I was constantly drawing.
And my siblings, I have a twin brother. My siblings were always really helpful. They would model for me especially my twin brother who was very patient with me. And as a result, my mother and father have lots of drawings and sketches that I did of my siblings: my twin brother and my two sisters.
Emmy: And you were pretty little when you did these drawings?
CB: I was from the age…. I was probably about twelve into my teens. Older when I was doing life drawings or portraits of my siblings.
They were very supportive and very kind and wanted to encourage me and they knew I was interested in that. And possibly a bit of an outsider child, and often not very sociable with other children, so, they, yeah, they were great.
Emmy: As you said, your family supported your aspirations. Did you have a mentor or special supportive adult?
CB: I really did. To start with, there was my mother and then my grandmother, who…she was French and during the time of the Second World War she was actually at the Sorbonne in Paris and then she went to the Beaux-Arts. And she loved art although she said she wasn’t herself, she felt, terribly talented, and she ended up studying history.
And she really, really encouraged me; it was one of her absolute passions.
And when I went to boarding school when I was 11, I had an absolutely incredible art teacher who was called Mrs. McDougal. And I will absolutely never forget her because she was incredibly encouraging. She actually gave me a key to the art room, because she knew I wanted to do arts in my spare time. And she also had a great collection of art history books and gave me access to her personal collection of art history books and this was in Somerset. I didn’t live in a city. This was in a small town called Wells in Somerset, so I was very privileged in that way. I got an incredible amount of encouragement and education and knowledge put my way by this individual.
Emmy: Isn’t that remarkable. Was art sort of looked on as an elective?
CB: In England, actually, art is not looked on as an elective. It’s something that is compulsory, and every single child has to do all the way up to what was then, “O” levels which is when you’re fifteen, you have to choose the subjects you’re going to do. You have to choose about, there are four compulsory subjects and four that you choose. But before that, art is compulsory for every child every week, at least for two or three classes, so yes, they found it to be a very important thing. Maybe not so much now, but back when I was young.
Emmy: That’s amazing. How would you describe or explain the art you do now?
CB: The art I do now is completely concentrated on deep reverence for nature, because that’s what I feel, living here in Southern Oregon, living in the mountains, surrounded by this absolutely incredible nature, observing the seasons, the cycles of life. It’s the most inspiring thing, Emmy, and it’s a structure that I use to hang my practice because art is a practice in the deeper sense of the word. I use nature to hang my practice of art on and it’s incredibly, incredibly satisfying and I can’t ever imagine coming to the end of it. There’s never the thought in my head that I’m going to run out of ideas.
Emmy: You have an amazing eye for detail in your paintings and drawings. Can you explain more on how does the natural world inspires you?
CB: It’s like looking down a telescope. It’s like complete focus. That’s why I really go for the details, the sort of microcosm rather than the macrocosm.
I haven’t gone into doing expansive landscapes or that kind of art because I find that incredible telescopic focusing that happens when you look deep, deep, deep into nature. seeing more and start noticing more and more.
It’s really expansive.
When I first moved to Oregon, Emmy, I actually took a whole year, of walking around, walking through the nature.
Ten years ago, when I moved to Oregon, I realized that my work was going to make an enormous shift because I’d moved from inner-city London where I lived for 18 years and this was like the biggest possible change that could happen. So, I took some time off, it was actually,
once I was organizing a house, buying a house, making sure my son was all set up in a new school.
I didn’t really do any work, and I spent my time walking, hiking, learning how to ski, really immersing myself in nature and that’s where it came from, that’s where, that’s where all this work came from. And the more I looked at nature, the more I realized rather than this kind of
expansive view of nature, it was the infinitesimal, the microcosmic, the small things: I was looking at mushrooms, I was looking at leaf molds, the tiny things, the passion in nature. That’s what fascinated me. That’s where all these drawings come from.
Emmy: Were you very good at biology and geometry as a student? Or did this inclination develop over time?
CB: Biology at school was my absolutely, my favorite subject. I really, really, enjoyed it. I loved
linking up what we could see with our physical eyes with what made me. It was just really the most inspiring thing for me apart from doing art.
I wanted to do Biology later on into “A” levels, which would be like AP courses, Advanced Placement courses, college credit courses here in America.
But in England, they always wanted to channel you, very young, so by the age of 15, if you were going to do biology, you would do chemistry and math or chemistry and physics because you were on-line to become a doctor or an epidemiologist or something like that. So, the colleges in England don’t have very broad courses, it’s always very, very narrow.
They are focusing down into a career.
So, I never had the intention of what people would call a career, I always wanted to be an artist. And I wanted to study biology, but since they didn’t offer it, I tried to study Zoology on my own, without a teacher. We didn’t have online then, so it was just through sending off the books and trying to teach myself but I ended up not doing that but still retaining a deep, deep, deep interest that will go on forever.
Emmy: How about Math! Your work has a lot of geometry in it; were you good at math?
CB: No. (laughs) I didn’t….my twin brother, actually, is an amazing, an amazing (laughs) mathematician to the point that he was taking what they call “S” level, or Scholarship level math when everyone else was studying their “A” levels.
I have a funny story. When I was studying for my “O” Level math, my brother was tutoring me, this was when I was 16 and he was very worried about me. I didn’t like math; I hadn’t had a very encouraging teacher and he was helping me. He gave me all the past papers over the holidays before the exam to do.
He taught me a lot and I started to enjoy it, and I did well as a result because of my brother’s teaching. So, that made me understand that if I had had a very, very good teacher, I might have been good at math.
So, my brother used to say to me, he said, “Clare, why don’t you like mathematics, it’s like poetry!”
For him he really understood it, and he got a lot out of it and he would try to induce me.
For me, it just never quite clicked.
But geometry, trigonometry, things like that, things that are spatial, things that are pattern oriented, I’m very, very interested in. Architecture, the physical application of math.
Emmy: Intuitively, you seem to understand it.
CB: Yes, but I always think about, how if my brother and I were one person, and we’re twins, we would make the perfect person.
I used to help him with his languages. You know, English homework, or French and I studied German, but yes, he would have to help me with math.
Emmy: That’s really interesting. When examining the arc of your artistic life and expression as an artist over the decades, what do you notice about the shifts and hurdles in your own arc of life that are reflected in your artwork? How does the act of creating art, address your own need to process or mourn or celebrate life’s events for you?
CB: The arts, and especially when I look back at the art I did as a child, a teenager, in my 20’s even in my 30’s, I wasn’t really aware at the time, but it completely reflected what I was going through on a personal level. I would say it even reflected what was going on historically.
It is like a mirror. I think all art mirrors your personal life, historical, cultural, all of it. And that’s why, actually, artists import this and people in the present can lose sight of that, but it is an alternative language that reflects everything that’s going on around it in a unique way through the individual.
So, yes, it really expresses everything that’s happened to me, every big change, and now since I’m so aware of that, when I feel myself going through a change, I’m very, very conscious of it in my work. I allow it; I allow it just to come forward, to evolve, in its own time and its own way. I don’t interfere with it.
Emmy: So, that kind of precious pause in life is important, not only in life, but in the creative process.
CB: It’s so important to not to be sucked into that energy of doing, doing, doing or half the wheel of life.
It’s so important to draw breath. Creativity is, I really understand, the human being is the channel, the tool. And to really do something creatively interesting relevant or significant,
you have to allow faith for it to flow through you, you really do, so that pause, yeah, is very, very important.
Emmy: I know that you came across the practice of Kundalini Yoga when you were still living in London, before you came to the US, and that you’ve been practicing this yoga for many years. I’m curious to know if your yoga practice has had any effect on your art or your creativity.
CB: I came across Kundalini Yoga when I was pregnant with Maurice, my son, so he’s just about to turn 18 and that was 18 years ago. Nearly 19 years ago, and interestingly, it was the only class that was offered for pregnant women in London where I lived at the time. So, I went to the class. It absolutely changed my life.
It was so perfect for me at that time, and as a result, I continued. I didn’t really start practicing every day until I moved to Ashland so that was 10 years ago. I didn’t have the time or the space, living in the city, all the commitments, the distractions. But slowly, over time, the practice has intensified and it’s absolutely essential to my practice, of doing my art.
Really, they’re inseparable. I don’t connect them up intellectually in my mind. I don’t connect the philosophy of Kundalini Yoga up with my art practice, but I just know that they are one and the same. It’s incredibly important to me, before I start doing my work, that I am in the most, calm, centered, focused place and that is exactly what Kundalini Yoga does to you. So, I can’t ever imagine swapping it out for another practice.
It’s just part of my life now.
Emmy: And you were telling me earlier that before you do any work you need to get to that place within yourself where you find your own truth. And that by your daily morning practice of Kundalini Yoga helps you get there, is that right?
CB: Yes, you’re completely right, Emmy because if you’re not in that place, then it’s a little bit like burbling when you talk or doodling when you draw. Both those things, in a conversation or with a piece of paper, is like trying to find your focus, but if I practice the meditation and the kriyas of Kundalini yoga, it just gets me to that point of focus, that point of truth, that deep combination of the uniqueness of me as being an individual, so it opens up that channel that link, what I would call the unknown. That allows true creativity to flow through you, the kind that you can’t really own or say is mine, but the kind that I would say of benefit, true benefit.
Emmy: Because your art is your truth. Your art is an expression of your truth, right? And so if you’re not already there, the art you create is not something you’d be proud of or feel is yours.
CB: Yes, I mean, I do very, very highly detailed drawings, they are often very large and they take months and months and months to do because I don’t see any point in just proliferating objects or drawings, proliferating more and more that’s not essential, true, refined.
Every drawing I do has to be as good or better than the last, it has to be an evolution because that’s what’s happening: we are all evolving, we are all expanding.
Emmy: You speak of your art as embedding the natural, intelligent cycles found in nature such as birth, death, and rebirth which happen continuously all around us and within us (such as the birth and death of ideas or inspiration or habits). This is very much in line with the yogic philosophy of the circle of life which starts and ends with Infinity. Are there parallels here for you and your artistic expression?
CB: Absolutely. The parallel is undeniable. Infinity is where it all starts and it all goes back to and in art, you think about the void because every time you start a new piece of work, there’s a blank piece of paper, completely blank, it’s a void, so the parallel is there.
Emmy: It starts and ends there.
CB: It starts and ends there! There’s a project one day I want to do which is starting with a blank void, a piece of paper, developing it to its most detailed or expanded as possible evolution and then taking it back to the void like coloring it all back in.
I think it would be amazing sense of cycle.
Emmy: Why do art. What does it fulfill in you?
CB: That’s such an interesting question because I never remember making the decision to DO art. It came to me; it came to me quite simply because of the natural facility I have with it. It’s just my instrument of expression because I’m not a natural wordsmith. So, art is the creative channel that is open to me. And all of us as human beings are creative; that’s very obvious.
In many, many different ways. It’s very simple; art is it for me.
Emmy: Your art can be described as abstract yet physically defined. It can seem mysterious and chaotic as well as perfectly balanced. It is filled with mesmerizing details and yet there is an easy big picture as one pulls back in perspective. This polarity of your work is provocative in that one can’t help but be drawn in and awed by the minutia and details, with an understanding that it reflects the complex mysteries seen in nature. Do you feel this sort of polarity lies within your work and is it intentional?
CB: What you just said there, Emmy, is very, very eloquent and it’s a very clear and good description my work as you can physically see it.
I’m very, very aware of the polarities: light and dark. You’re literally, well I work on a white piece of paper, making it more dense and darker. Or even a black piece of paper, highlighting the light.
So, you’re constantly in a very literal way, working with polarities. In fact, that’s what actually forms our physical world that we can see. If you didn’t have light, you couldn’t see any object.
So, yes, in a deeper way, we live in this world that we have to constantly try to bring back to homeostasis, to balance, and that’s through observing the polarities and it’s the same with doing the drawings. You’re constantly creating a balance which is why I do the interlocking circles or some form of matrix underneath; because that is an innate balance.
Indeed, nature has an innate balance that forms, and the drawings have the same. I observe it in nature so I put that in my drawings.
If you don’t have a structure underneath, it will take you ten times as long to figure out the drawings, to balance it. It will just look like a crazy doodle. Yes, there’s the balance, always trying to come back to the balance and the polarities that you play with in order to come to that balance.
Emmy: I love that you are now creating wallpaper, for it is both a practical and accessible way to bring design and beauty right into one’s home on a mass scale. How did this come about for you and can you describe your intention?
CB: So, coming from England, everybody has wallpaper in their house. Often people live in very old houses, for instances one of the houses I lived in had some original William Morris wallpaper that’s from the Arts and Crafts era. And people still put wallpaper in their house. And people hang pictures on top of that wallpaper. They incorporate it into all their interior design. It’s not an unusual thing to have wallpaper in your house.
And my favorite museum in London, is called the Victoria and Albert Museum. They have the most incredible collection of textiles and wallpapers, and I’ve spent many hours looking through, getting inspiration, loving all of that; very inspiring to me. It’s the incorporation of nature into all-natural living environment. It occurred to me, people who live in cities, often live in a very stark environments and the one thing they need more than anything is nature to be introduced. They often yearn to leave the city but it can take them hours and hours and hours.
I was doing a show in San Francisco, and I had lots of highly detailed drawings and I wanted to make one really, really big drawing and I suddenly realized that wallpaper, designing a wallpaper would be the best way to make an intimately large drawing and a beautiful immersive backdrop for the very bright drawings that would going to be hung on top of it. It was very successful and people loved the whole thing, and it occurred to me that I could design a whole lot more and I love the idea of people accessing nature through that open environment and hanging art on top of it.
I’m trying to recreate a fashion that was there back in the Victorian and Edwardian times in England, but to modernize it and uplift people in their homes. So that’s the idea behind it.
And I love repeating patterns, because this is what happens in nature.
It happens down into the microscopic levels; it happens all the way up into the universe. The patterns, repetition.
Emmy: Am I correct, you have one wallpaper or maybe several that are, it looks like a grove of trees.
CB: Yes, that was actually a drawing that I was commissioned to do by these people, really, really nice clients of my gallery in San Francisco and they’d seen the drawings that I did of my trees and they wanted me to do a bigger one, and I took that drawing and repeated it into actually a mural. It doesn’t repeat top to bottom, it just repeats side to side.
Emmy: And now you have a wallpaper business online (Laughs!)! Is that right?
But you don’t hang it for people! (laughs)
CB: No, I have eight designs so far and every time I get inspired to do another one, I’ll keep doing them. So, I’m not turning it into a business in the sense that I feel I have to do a collection or three collections a year, but every time I’m inspired to do a wallpaper that will hang as an immersive background of drawings, I’ll do another one.
Emmy: Would you explain the Oregon Percent for Art Commission at Western Oregon University award, which you recently received?
CB: , this is like my dream commission that Western Oregon University was upgrading their Natural Sciences building which is a mid-century modern building but being beautifully refurbished. Oregon Percent for the Art is an organization that was created in the 1970’s and it’s great for artists because one percent of the building project budget goes toward art for the building or around the building: Public art basically.
And so, I got this commission: The Natural Science Building and the subject, the broad subject is a series of seven pieces of work was “evolution”, and I had to do these very big drawings, one for the Earth Sciences Wing, one for the Biology Wing and a series of drawings that would go down the hallways linking the two.
Emmy: Perfect for you!
CB: Perfect for me! So, the Biology wing was actually really easy because that’s all my interest I had been pursuing over the last, you know, lifetime.
I did a drawing called “Homeostasis” and incorporated all my favorite things, and in the middle there was a DNA spiral and also interlocking circles below everything.
The Earth Sciences Wing was a bit more challenging for me because I hadn’t studied Earth Sciences but it was really fascinating for me, especially living here in Oregon because we
live in the most amazing place: volcanos, rocks, and all the things that go on underneath the earth is very, very rich, so I starting using it as an excuse to go on walks and explore volcanic landscape and all these incredible things.
And I did a drawing that was basically, from Void to Density. It was going through the elements, I had that as my very broad theme going up from earth, to fire, to water, air and then ether, which is why I call the piece “Quintessence” The fifth elements.
Emmy: Beautiful, Clare. That ties us back to yoga again with those elements!
CB: Yes! Yes!
Emmy: Wonderful. Now I’ve seen your studio and you often have pieces of rock with lichen or you have a piece of a tree branch or … Do you work from photographs?
Do you photograph or do you haul things into your studio and work from the real thing?
CB: I do both. I haul so much stuff into my studio. It’s crawling with little tiny bugs that I have to save and put back outside. All the stuff that I haul in I put back outside again and it’s always stuff that I’ve picked up off the forest floor. I don’t go hacking things off trees or anything like that. And I take hundreds and hundreds of photographs and print them out or look at them on my phone and print them out the ones that are the most inspiring and they act as my life models.
Emmy: You also serve as a mentor to young people as I know you teach some private classes and have taught at your son’s former school. You have also told me that you prefer to teach children. What is it about the child artist that appeals to you and what would be your advice to young people?
CB: So, I started teaching young children 10 years ago, not long after I moved to Oregon because a friend of mine, their child was friends of my son.
They used to come to the house a lot. I used to do drawing with my son and his friend. And she suggested, she said, “Why don’t you do an art class?” It seemed like a good idea since I was pretty much doing it anyway. So, I started doing these art classes, and I found it to be incredibly inspiring and also a great honor to teach young people.
They’re so open; they’re so fresh. It brought me back. It is an honor to teach them.
For me, teaching them was like a kind of win/win situation. They would get a lot out of it because I wasn’t a qualified teacher, but I myself have my own fresh approach and I can teach them what I learned, you know, very recently because as a practicing artist, I’m constantly learning.
So, it wasn’t going to be some tired exercise from a textbook or something. It was going to be a fresh new idea that I just learned last week. In fact, that was always my technique with the teaching of the children: is whatever I was most enthusiastic about or whatever I was most into at the time, I would put in front of them and see how they dealt with it.
And the drawings they did were absolutely incredible. And it was always a multi-faceted approach because when they’re young, they don’t try and copy each other. They’re all individuals and they all take a completely different viewpoint and they’re not self-conscious about being themselves.
And it’s a very, very rewarding and incredibly inspiring thing to teach young people. They’re not closed down or judgmental or critical of themselves like adults.
So, the advice I would give all young people or all people in general is: Be who you are. Whether you’re drawing, writing, creating in any way, just be who you are.
The individual that you are. Never be pushed away from that. Don’t judge yourself.
Emmy: What do you think happens when we become adults that we become so self-conscious of what it is we are creating?
CB: I think because human beings are basically herd animals. They try and fit together in the most harmonious way and that will often sort of shave off one’s own individuality. Water down, dissolve the individuality.
But when you’re doing something creative like art, the thing that really stands out, is when somebody is purely and unashamedly individual and themselves.
Like their handwriting; everyone has very individual handwriting and I would say most adults, unless they’ve been trained to write in a very particular way, still have very individual handwriting.
So, it could be a good practice to go back and look at your handwriting.
And, actually, that changes from day to day as well. So just honoring, the shifts and the change, the ebb and flow of energy in life.
Not pushing that aside, not pretending it’s not there. But as adults, we think we have to be strong: we’re holding great burdens, or we think we’re holding great burdens. We’re captains of the ships of our families. There are many pressures in modern day society which sometimes means the creativity, the individuality takes the back seat.
Emmy: How do you keep your creativity alive? How do you keep that child-like wonder in your work?
CB: I live a very simplified life. That’s what really good about living here in Ashland, in Oregon. There’s no pressure, there are no stresses, unless you put them on yourself. You have the option to lead a very hermetic life if you need to. But if you want to, you can go out and get as much socializing and interaction as you want. But to be an artist you really, really, really need to spend an awful lot of time on your own.
It’s a very contemplative lifestyle and I have that here. I always have the space and the time.
I only have one child.
I have a very supportive husband. I have a perfect environment. It’s the perfect situation, the constantly being a creative person.
I can take journeys into the city if I need to interact with culture. There’s the internet, there’s no reason not to be connected to the world, but you can shut it all down when you need to.
Emmy: A lot of artists, I’m generalizing here, of course, but it seems to be that people will gravitate to alcohol, excessive drinking, excessive use of drugs. It’s kind of the stereotypical image of the artist. Why do you think that is and yet that obviously didn’t happen to you?
CB: It seems really obvious to me why that is. To do true creative work: whether it’s art, music, writing, you have to open yourself up to the channels of creativity, you have to open yourself up to the void. That it in itself can be a very expanding experience, it can be frightening. And to live in this world, it’s very hard, especially if you have a lot of attention on you. Let’s say you’re a very famous musician, you have all these people around you, pointing their egos at you, wanting some of the reflected adulation that you’re receiving by knowing you. It’s a huge pressure.
A bit like Elvis. He obviously opened himself up to this intense, and amazing, truthful and beautiful creativity and then he needed to take substances to bring himself back to earth, back on to the earth plane to shut himself down, maybe to give himself a rest because if your nervous system is not prepared for that, then it will literally blow your circuits.
Which is why I practice Kundalini Yoga, Emmy, because it really prepares your nervous system for everything, for life which can be intense for everyone.
Emmy: And if you do become what we call famous in our culture, there is a demand to produce your art maybe at a rate that’s not normal, or that someone can’t keep up with.
CB: Yes, if your work becomes commercialized, there’s going to be a demand to create more and more of it. The world will put pressure on you to become commercialized even, especially in America because it’s very capitalist and that’s the nature of things and if people want your work, then, there you go, it’s going to put terrible pressure on you and yes, as a human being, sometimes, you don’t have too much to give.
Emmy: I always marvel at someone who comes out with an incredible novel and maybe it wins the Pulitzer Prize, and it’s incredible and everyone always asks, “When is your next novel coming!” And I think, ‘Isn’t one enough! That’s my life work, I did it! Yeah! Let’s celebrate that! Do I have to do it again!’
CB: Yes, it’s very true, it’s interesting, Emmy, I just read The Leopard by Lampedusa which he was an amazing writer; he wrote all about Sicily and the history. It was one of the most incredible books I’ve ever read. He only wrote one book and he was very sensible: he wrote it later in life and he died before it was published, maybe that’s the answer. (laughs)
Emmy: Right. Right. And Harper Lee wrote one book and I always thought, “That makes perfect sense to me!” I only have one child, that’s my, that’s my most important creation.
CB: Yes, me too!
Emmy: (laughs) Clare Burbridge, thank you so much for joining me today.
CB: Thank you, Emmy, it’s been a real pleasure.
Emmy: This is Sacred Truths with Emmy Graham
Music by Manpreet Kaur. @ManpreetKaurmusic
My guest today was Clare Burbridge. For more information on Claire or to contact the artist, please go to www.claireburbridge.com.
To view and purchase her wallpapers, visit www.claireburbridge.com
Please visit our website at www.sacred-truths.com. Thank you for listening.