How and when did you begin making art?  Do the things that originally sparked your interest in art-making still play a role in your work?

YB: I began making art as a child. My grandfather was an artist, although he did not make a living as one. I also took classes in painting starting at the age of six, and at the age of seven I met my first influential teacher. I was encouraged to make art at home, where culture was revered, but also the teacher was a person with an independent mind, a sense of humor, profound curiosity and a belief in experimentation. He was supportive and infectious. 

I was read to, I read a lot on my own, and I listened to folk and fairy tales on records while painting. That is probably where I understood that art has to articulate through its many contexts, materials, codes, surfaces, scales, and the idea of narrative became important. It still is, but not in a linear sense. Also the importance of labor was solidified; then and now work speaks to me only when I give it time. I don’t hear it otherwise. Then and now, I understand the importance of the outside feeding paintings, but so does the dreamy universe of hermetic existence. Both seasons, both modes of being play a crucial role in my life as an artist still. Having a wide variety of interests, not just ones related to art, that too stayed with me since childhood.

Can you tell us a bit about your process – do you work from sketches or studies, or is your practice more improvisational?

YB: I make a lot of drawings which are quick. I think about them as a kind of bone structure I am searching for, a communicative composition which is allowed to change as it is translated into painting. I collect drawings in what I call books, which are sketchbooks organized according to location, a particular time, a particular idea, or a symbol. Often I draw when I travel or on short residencies. 

I will also draw midway into a painting. If a particular painting puzzles me so much that I cannot see its skeleton, as in the composition it hangs on, I can search for it anew through drawing. Drawing is a kind of seduction into painting for me. It is also a record of different chapters and ideas in my life. For example, I made a series of drawings during my month-long residency in Maine. This was more than a year and a half ago but I am still returning to books from that time and pulling from their vocabulary. Sometimes drawing is a complicator. It is what in fact does not merely solve a visual or a conceptual question but rather layers and deepens it. It roots for: “You thought it was about this and this, but in fact it also hints at this, implies this, and smells of this.”

Though drawing is part of the process of materializing an idea, intuition, play, and a kind of call and response are always part of my work. A drawing is rarely directly translated into a painting and painting for me is not an exercise in carrying out a rigid plan. There is room for generating meaning.