One of the skills I’ve developed as a self-proclaimed psychotherapist is analyzing people’s personalities by studying their artwork. I think that this is a great way to gain insight because so much of the unconscious mind is expressed through art. (Yeah, like duh, Dr. Lisa. As if I haven’t heard that before, so art history 101.) If you’d like an example of my particular style of psychoanalysis through the subject’s artwork, here’s a short video, edited from a TV show that I covered at City Without Walls. The show, called “LOL”, was curated by Larry Walczak. Artists in the video are David Kramer and Amy Hill.Would you like to have your artwork analyzed by Dr. Lisa? Send in three images, short writing pieces, or whatever it is that you make to [email protected].
Last week I was at a Bushwick Open Studios meeting at Brooklyn Fireproof and an interesting exhibition by Margot Bird caught my eye. Pardon the pun. Margot’s work was portraits of strangers that she took and painted with cascading eyeballs. They were wonderful paintings and indicated some sort of obsession not only with the eyeballs, but with a large quantity of paintings. So between Margot’s artist’s statement and studying her paintings I came up with this assessment:
The idea of using eyeballs came to Margot through a partial life-altering hallucination while getting acupuncture in New Orleans. She is now obsessed with making these paintings with eyeballs. She starts out with photographs she takes of people on the street. I think Margot is working out the connection of the eyeballs to a feeling she has within her that she can’t quite identify.
