William Sky visited my home/studio over a long weekend in March of 2023. The aim of his work is to interview and understand the work of various artists while video taping them and then to post the results on his YouTube site, MindColour. Usually he only films one interview per artist; but, he decided to stay over a weekend with me and my wife since he was driving over from the East San Francisco Bay. Over the weekend he got inspired and he completed 3 videos focusing on the background of how I came to create my art, then the process I use to make it, and finally he filmed a naming session attended by 9 people who named 3 sculptures by consensus as we discussed the stories each piece told.
Although some of this material can also be found under the Zoom presentation I recorded to the Monterey Jung group which I posted under the Biography section of this website, I felt Williams eloquent interviewing style added alot to better understanding my work so I decided to share links to each of the videos he created below.
Brad Burkhart-Intutive Clay Sculptor
Unveiling Creativity: The Art Making Process of Brad Burkhart
From Inspiration to Identity: the Unique Naming Process of Visionary Artist Brad Burkhart
Read on to hear the first person account of what unfolded in the eloquent words of participant, Dan White (to the right of me by the easel:
“Last year, I experienced ‘Synchronous Listening’ — a phenomenon in which a group of people’s brain waves sync together briefly while they are in a room listening to a piece of live music. The audience looks at the motions and expressions of the musicians while taking in the sound waves, and a kind of transmission takes place — the audience locking into the creative minds of the performers.
“Something similar took place at Brad’s house — but I think of it as ‘Synchronous Naming’ — a group of people, some of them friends, others who barely knew each other, locked into Brad’s sculptures, synced with his creative vision, and completed his works of art by naming them.
“The generosity of Brad’s vision moved me — a work is unfinished, in a liminal state, until a group of people gather around it, interpret, and introduce it to the world, taking thoughts and impressions and turning them into language.
“Brad provided us with sculptures that were specific on the one hand, but open-ended: three canine figures beneath a series of moons, a mysterious duckish being with a stylized human face, and butterflies and an amphibious frog-person gathered by vines next to a disembodied hand breaking out from a void.
“The group had an array of interpretations: references to ancient belief systems, musical signifiers, pop music references, even the recurring memories of one participant’s childhood imaginary friend named Soakey Peter. No interpretation was considered ‘wrong’ or transgressive. This was not a soccer match of ideas but a common upwelling, notions and interpretations bouncing off each other at eccentric angles.
“And for me, the most moving part was something I never expected — an upwelling of agreement, and a surge of support. It will always be a mystery to me exactly how we as a group arrived at the names. All I know is that the process led us there, and Brad’s artwork — mystical, whimsical, provocative, sad, and willfully incomplete for the sake of capaciousness — gave us much to contemplate.”
