Meg Boe Birns

Both my work are especially driven by a need for texture, and feature a level of impasto that indicates a sculptural value. I work with paint, canvas, papier mache, wood and other media to create pieces that do not subsume the materials within the content, but instead make the materials I am using part of the subject matter. Whether abstract or figurative, my work will often integrate tactility into a design or pattern, but it is not the product of a conscious or intellectual plan. No one said this better than the art critic Tony Cavanaugh, who wrote that I create "with an intuitive feeling, as though the imagery springs directly from the artist's unconscious in the manner of automatic writing." Another way of saying this is that my work comes from a part of my psyche that is hidden from me. Or more recently this is a side of myself I find when it is as if I have entered a magical forest, or a magical forest that is always waiting for me; a forest that as Baudelaire says, is filled with things that “look at me with familiar eyes.”

Influence/affinities: Leonora Carrington, Judy Scott, Yayoi Kusama

Meg Boe Birns is an artist, poet, and literary critic living and working in the East Village. She has studied privately with Lenora Shargo of the Maryland Institute of Art, Henry Pearson of The New School and Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and has also been a student in a number of art classes at The New School. She has exhibited her work in a variety of venues in and around New York City, including the Small Works at the Washington Square East Gallery, the TNC Gallery, the Ridge Street Gallery, the Lynn Prince Gallery, and the Art for Healing Gallery. Her drawings have been published in the Art Times, Collages and Bricolages, The Creative Woman and on the cover of the premiere issue of I, The First Person. She has been given awards by the Rockland Center for the Arts and the National Art League.