Painting the inside of our new house was by far the single most stressful part of renovating. Tearing out floors, walls, ceilings: No problem. But for some reason choosing between "Dancing Butterfly," "Joyous," and "Chilled Lemonade" (all Behr yellow shades, by the way) gave me the horrors. I polled my artist and graphic-designer friends: How do you look at a paint chip and visualize something other than a paint chip? Is it a talent, or something you can learn?

If I had been banging my head against the wall at Home Depot in LA rather than San Francisco, Brigette Burns might have been standing there next to me, watching one more new homeowner lose her grip, face to face with that vast array of colors and their happy, Hallmark-ish, embarrassing-to-repeat names. Burns began painting on paint chips when she moved from New York City to Southern California in 1997 and started noticing Hope Depot as a suburban sociocultural phenomenon. Her first ink-drawn paint-chip series took inspiration directly from the names of the Behr colors. It was lighthearted, sometimes even humorous, and not particularly autobiographical.

Burns's latests presentation, however, is quite the opposite. Her palette is consistent and restrained, mostly muted gray and beige, and the tone is stark and moody. She applies her ink drawings onto a grid of square paint chips, which she then shuffles around, sometimes replacing painted chips with blank ones to insert fractures and spaces into what was once, we assume, a more or less coherent narrative scene. What remains is a poetic, fragmented love story about her recent relationship with a man who spends long periods of time sailing on the ocean, completely out of touch. The titles (Then It Vanished, For a Long Time I Would Go to Bed Early) would never fly as commercial paint-color names -- they are too melancholy, too sleepy and dreamy, too entangled in a morass of emotion -- but they definitely do work as vivid descriptions of the past year of the artist's life.

Burns is cagey about what we get to see; faces are almost always turned away, either obscured by hanging hair or simply removed with the deletion of a paint chip. But we are never left wondering what her characters are thinking because their body language speaks such volumes. In Furthest Horizon, we look at her nude, seated body from above. That we can see so much of her back means she's hunched over, and her knocked-together knees give her a shy, reserved, self-protective aspect. Above, bits of seashore clearly function as thought bubbles; she's not at the beach, but she's thinking of someone on the water. Similarly heart-on-the-sleeve are Rooms in Winter, in which Burns faces away from us wearing and underskirt and an updo (preparing for a wedding, maybe?) and Rooms in Summer, where a similar skirt is now empty and collapsed on the floor, symbolizing, perhaps, wedding plans foiled.

Burns doesn't make a clear distinction between which vignettes we should interpret literally as actual occurrences and which took place only in her imagination. But there is something unambiguous and almost embarrassingly literal about her rendering of bodies, especially that of the man who is sometimes present, sometimes absent. Her bodies are sometimes awkward or oddly proportioned -- with limbs that seem too large or genitals unapologetically lolling about -- and we often feel like voyeurs, spying on a private moment between two lovers who spend little enough time together as it is. But there is also a painstaking preciseness to the way she represents hands, feet, and her own thick, straight hair, hanging down to cover her melancholy, elusive face.

Lindsey Westbrook
Artweek, October, 2004, p. 14