Making Sense of Self Through Art With Laura Berger

Artist Laura Berger talks beginnings in art for healing, realities of being a full time artist, and her new show opening this week in San Francisco.

The work of Laura Berger presents a manifestation of support, positivity, and empowerment. Female figures dance and embrace amid shifting organic shapes to represent a multitude of feelings and experiences that hum in her subconscious. Such topics span gender, race, class, and world peace. More personal subjects bubble up to the surface as well including a sense of belonging and concerns about feeling small in a larger world. However, these are ever evolving as she creates fluidly, allowing for organic movement in her thoughts to translate onto paper, wood, or canvas. It’s in this way that her work has evolved. 

Her ideas are loosely sparked by rumination, materializing in a number of ways as she works through the sensation. Backgrounds are formed from images that randomly pop into her head; and often she enjoys working with color and smooth shapes to be able to formulate a more refined visual. “I try to record these and later work with some of them to get them into a more polished place and possibly make a painting from them…I also like the idea of abstracting the backgrounds a little so they don’t have to necessarily be one specific thing—they could represent a variety of things.”

For Berger, art began, as with many, as a way to “feel better.” In the process, she finds clarification on internal happenings to work through them either solidly or release them. Her greatest challenge, she describes is overcoming messages she’d received as a child that stuck with her that “make it hard to be consistently kind to myself and to feel understood and accepted.” 

“We need art in the world so we can gain understanding and create a visual record of our collective history through all of our individual viewpoints. And of course art is beautiful and good for our spiritual well being.” 

While she stuck heavily to the creative realm in school—majoring in performance and minoring in design, honing in on scenic painting and costume rendering—she is mostly self-taught. Afterwards, she freelanced as a scenic artist before moving to Chicago to promptly lose interest in acting. “I was just waiting tables and feeling totally lost about what I wanted to do with my life—pretty normal stuff. I started painting for myself as a hobby and a way to distract myself following a really hard period in my life around age 26.” It seemed the world was crumbling with everything falling apart. On top of it she’d lost her father. One night she sat at her kitchen table and painted for hours; and then she started doing that every night. 

Berger primarily uses acrylic and acrylic gouache paint on wood panels, dabbling in clay and ceramic sculpture. For ideas that crop up, she keeps little notebooks, writing them down in words and perhaps a quirk thumbnail sketch. Her vision may be fluid, but her process in creating a body of work is quite regimented.

“When I’m planning a series of paintings, I’ll go through recent notes and make a list of the ideas that seem most interesting to me, and then I’ll try to find connecting threads among those and kind of hone in on things from there.  Once I have the idea for a painting, I’ll draw a small sketch and then work with that for a while to get the composition right. Then I often will scan it into my computer so I can test print the sketch out at different sizes and see which size feels right and then continue to polish the drawing at size with pencil. I gesso the panel and sand the dried gesso layer so it’s smooth, paint the background color and then transfer the drawing to paint.”

“I never imagined it would be my career, but I guess I was spending so much time on it that it just sort of slowly and naturally evolved from there.” 

Now, she’s been shown internationally in galleries like Hashimoto Contemporary, Miami Art Week, Spoke Art SF, exists in large-scale productions like the mural at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs, and has developed custom wallpaper with Lemon Design as well as blankets for Slowdown Studio, amid another notable accomplishments. This month, she’s part of a group exhibition at Heron Arts entitled “Future Sun,” along with Ellen Rutt, Kristin Texeira, and Sofie Ramos. Opening January 18th, the show asks artists to comment on human connection and the evolution of interconnectivity.

“Even if the thought behind a painting is coming from a dark or challenging place, I generally like to paint images that feel like a positive visualization of possibilities—sort of dreamy or utopic ways of being,” she says. “I’ve been working a lot with themes of connection—to the self, to others, to our environment, to spirituality. I like thinking about our collective search for meaning and understanding.”

What are some of the realities of being a full time artist (or becoming one)?  

Working all of the time and a large portion of that time being administrative work, feeling weird feelings about your work, hand pain, other people not understanding that you aren’t just sitting around in your underwear sipping coffee and casually drawing here and there (though I suppose this might happen sometimes).

Advice to start your own business?  

Work hard and a lot so you’re always finding ways to improve, and just keep going. Make use of social media, even if you hate it.  And don’t listen to people who tell you it can’t be done. There’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur of any kind—there are so many avenues to build your own audience and to both randomly and intentionally connect with people from all over the world.

What does it mean to make a difference? 

I think it means to use your existence here in this life to be a force of good in any tiny way you can, even if that just means smiling at others or petting a cat or whatever.  Just being the good self that you were born as and choosing to live consciously in a non-harming manner is awesome. I’d say anything beyond that is bonus points.

How do you stay inspired? 

I love to travel and I’d say that’s my favorite way to get inspired.  But anytime I just have some mental spaciousness where I’m not thinking about anything in particular is generally a time where some ideas will pop up out of nowhere.  For me ideas are usually sparked in really basic ways—like I’ll see a texture on a wall and I’ll get an idea for something.