Portland Art Gallery Artist: Mary Lynn Burke

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I am Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast where we explore creativity and the human spirit. We are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. Today it is my great pleasure to introduce you to Mary Lynn Burke, who is one of our newest artists here at the Portland Art Gallery. Thank you so much for coming in today.

Mary Lynn Burke: Thank you for having me.

Lisa Belisle: What I love about your background is that you've done quite a few different things, but social work, that is not one that I hear every day from artists. So you had been interested in education and children and social work. Tell me about that, and then the leap over into art.

Mary Lynn Burke: I was always the one at family get-togethers who wanted to watch the younger kids. I liked that role, and my aunts and uncles would say, oh, can you watch so-and-so at the party, and it made me feel like I was doing something really important. So that's probably where that started. I just loved this age, the young preschool age, and so I started doing that. Even in high school, I would leave school an hour early and work at the preschool, and then went into teaching preschool. As I was in college, I realized learning about how to teach math or how to teach, it actually wasn't my strong suit. When I was teaching it was that one-on-one connection of the kids who had something that was maybe a need that went beyond the scope of the academics.

I was doing nanny work during college. One of the families I worked for, she was a therapist, she was a social worker, and we got talking and she would say, gosh, you're so good with the kids in this way, in that way. The more I started saying, oh, I don't know about this teaching math stuff, so I switched my major. When I switched to social work third year of undergrad, I knew it was a match because it somehow was easy and felt instinctual, writing these papers, and the topics were more aligned for me, so I knew where I needed to be. Then you have to figure out, well, what do you want to do next?

Grad school was an easy next step. I had a little bit of time off in between undergrad and grad school and went right into a concentrated 10-month program for grad school. That's where I started the focus on clinical. I worked at a therapeutic preschool, and one of the women trained with Anna Freud. So it was a really excellent opportunity and good training there. I loved working with the families, but there wasn't a lot of work and I wanted to get into it a lot more diagnostically and get more training. So I worked with adults, and then I worked in adoption, foster care, and I was inner city Detroit, going through these houses to get licensed for foster homes, which was very eye-opening to see what was really going on in the community in that space.

We're walking into these homes and seeing those needs, and I enjoyed that. Then I worked with teen girls in a residential facility as a therapist, and having families come in for that. So a lot of group and family work became important as well. The hours seemed endless, I couldn't really turn it off. I found myself staying off hours all the time because I would spend all the time in the groups, and then the paperwork part was what I would save for the after hours because I just wanted to make sure I was giving the girls and the families what they needed.

So I then took a job, which was a real turn, but I'm really glad I did. I ended up where I met my husband. I went and worked at one of the hospitals in inner city Detroit as a social worker in the cardiac unit and telemetry for the first year, and then from there I went into the OB and the neonatal intensive care unit for the last two years. So that job, child protective services, there was a lot to see and learn. We would cover through the whole hospital, so it was definitely a specialty role as that social worker. I learned so much there. And I met my husband there. He was doing his residency. He's from New England. We ended up here because he would take me when he would visit family, and I fell in love with Boston, and we moved to Boston in 2004.

While we were living here, I was always working. I was waitressing, I was doing nanny work, I was doing so many different things, always had a couple jobs going on. There was this period of time where I had a few months off after we moved here, and I thought, what do I do with myself? This is unusual to have time like that. We had a little digital camera and I was going around spending so much time with it. I took a night photography course and the professor said, you should consider the full-time program. I was taking dark room classes and working with film, and I was working at Children's Hospital in Boston at the time. I left the job and I went for that program. It was a big step, but I knew there was no other option. It was calling me so deeply and it was speaking to something that I never really tapped into, this creative side, and it was self-reflection, whereas all my work had always been about others. This was something I hadn't really explored.

Lisa Belisle: Your husband is an emergency medicine physician?

Mary Lynn Burke: Yes, correct. That's right.

Lisa Belisle: So I really hope someday that you have a chance to meet my daughter-in-law, Danny, who's a social worker, and my son who's an emergency medicine physician.

Mary Lynn Burke: What a world. What a world.

Lisa Belisle: And he currently works at Boston, so it's so many things going on.

Mary Lynn Burke: It was such a special place.

Lisa Belisle: But it's so interesting hearing you talk because when my husband and I visited for the residency graduation, I would watch Danny and Campbell talk back and forth, and the language of medicine and the language of social work are aligned, but different. The language I would hear them using across the table was so fascinating to me, and it was so wonderful to know that you could approach the care of humans from such different perspectives. Just knowing that you and your husband have had that kind of parallel path is really interesting to me.

Mary Lynn Burke: Yes, it is. And it was interesting. We were both very private people in the workplace especially. We both kind of didn't even want anyone to know we were dating. We found out pretty quickly we both wanted everything to stay really private, but we would work together. He was doing his residency, so he was only on the telemetry unit for a month, and I remember he had this presence and he consulted me, but we never connected at that time. Later, after we were dating and he was doing his rotation through the neonatal intensive care unit, I did feel like this is a really special thing, that he and I could work together. He has an incredible work ethic and his heart is in his work as much as mine is, and that was just nice to see. So now to this day, we can have that conversation together and understand each other in a unique way.

Lisa Belisle: And both of those are challenging professions in different ways, but both of them are incredibly intense when it comes to caring for humans in a really special way. You're entering people's lives at a time that can be really challenging for them, whether you're going to somebody's home as a social worker or whether you're in the neonatal unit and this time of birth. Birth into sometimes great difficulty is similar to people showing up in the emergency department as what they often will say is the worst day of their life. So being able to interface at that level, to have that sensitivity and that resilience, is amazing.

Mary Lynn Burke: I feel like I did miss it. I missed my moment. One of the things was we rotated throughout the whole hospital. The emergency room has its own social workers, so I never actually saw him in the ED, but we have this unique experience to have worked in Detroit together specifically. It's a really special community. They have their own unique needs, every city does. But I think that we go back to that time a lot and think about what that community needed that was different than some of the things we see here, the culture that is just this warmth and that connection we had with the people we worked with, the nurses and the staff and some of the family dynamics that would come in, these strong bonds. And then also a lot of violence, a lot of things that you just never think you could imagine that you're seeing. But I think there's a lot of change happening in Detroit at the moment. So we're both feeling really excited and watching what's happening there. My family's all still in Michigan, so we're back there as much as we can.

Lisa Belisle: You also shared early adventures in New Zealand, for example, as a family, as a couple. Tell me how that has influenced not only your perspective on life, but also potentially your perspective on being an artist.

Mary Lynn Burke: Oh, it was a profound impact on all of us. From 2019 to 2021, we lived there. Our kids were just turned 10 and just turned eight. Leading up to it, my husband and I are outdoor people, we're active people. We love camping and biking and all these things. Both of us just felt like we were ready for a change. I love travel, I love travel planning. We had never gone that far. We had never really taken our kids that far flying, out to the west coast once, we had gone to Aruba. We hadn't gone to many places with the kids yet. So New Zealand was a really far stretch. But I just started doing this research, where could we live? Let's try living abroad. On our honeymoon, we went to French Polynesia, and I remember we had a travel planner at the time, and she said, do you want to go to New Zealand? And we were like, well, yeah, but that's its own special trip. We just wanted to relax and beach. We did do some hikes and some adventures, but it was just another seven-hour flight.

So I had started researching going to New Zealand, and it turned out his work was on their shortlist for needs. My job could transfer. I wasn't working. I was a stay at home mom strictly and an artist at the time, mostly just doing photography and some mixed media work, but I hadn't even ever painted really, except for maybe a little bit with encaustic. So just through the research I found out this is an option, and he said, well, let's go. We'll take a reconnaissance trip and we'll go see if this is really, because he was really intrigued.

We went, we loved it. We went for two weeks, we loved it. Then we came back and we said, let's see what this takes to get visas. So we went through the process, he got the job, and when he got the job offer, we were just, okay, this is real. The kids are getting fingerprinted, everything you do for the visas. We ended up in this really, really beautiful area of New Zealand that's pretty removed from the rest of the north island. You have to go through a long gorge, twisty, turny, a couple three hours to get in and out of it. So it was so special, and a large population of indigenous Maori people lived there. So it had all the beautiful culture that we were looking for, and beaches and surfing, which we had never done.

It was June before the pandemic, so we were there in a great timeframe, and it was quiet. We didn't really know anyone, we don't have any family, no one there we knew. So that time of just quiet reflection, I would spend hours and hours out at the beach and in nature every day. The schools there don't have as many off days. We have so many off days of school for different reasons in our school district and in many in the states, but it was pretty solid. There's no half days. The holidays were two-week breaks, so we could travel, really get out and explore the country, but it was just that time of quiet and not having all the lists. We rented a house that was maybe a third of the size of where we live, which we were looking forward to.

So we just had to eliminate and simplify and bring what we could fit on the plane, and seeing ourselves as being so adaptable, how our family could just endure and bravely face a big change like that. We brought it on ourselves, but it was life changing. I feel like the reflection during those long hours and days spent with nature was when my art a hundred percent came forward. It was changing for me because I worked through a lot of those inner questions that I had about life, myself, any of the issues, things that I was struggling with, I was able to just have that time to process. It was a big mindset shift for me.

Lisa Belisle: As you're describing New Zealand and the travels and the adventures and the beaches and the nature, I can actually see that in your work. I know your work is very abstract. It's not like there are pictures of trees specifically, but the colors, the vibrancy, the imagery. I love the sense that it's almost like somehow an embodiment of your experience.

Mary Lynn Burke: Oh, I agree. I was always with my camera walking around, and I couldn't believe what I was looking at through my lens, through the viewfinder where we were, just remarkable. But then I found myself back at the computer, it is a digital camera, and I really was thinking, I don't want to be sitting at the computer. I want to do something with my hands. With my photographs I use a lot of layering, and they're often abstract and painterly. So I thought, well, maybe actually painting might be the next step. But what I did was I started using cyanotype, and I learned from Meghann Riepenhoff, she's done incredible work, so I credit her to this process. Solar signatures, a body of work where I coat watercolor paper with the cyanotype, this photographic emulsion that's light sensitive.

So you're kind of in a dark space, and you cover the paper, and then I would put them in a cooler and take them out to the beach. As soon as the sun hits, if you put your hand over the paper, it would create the shadow where the shadow would be would stay, and the rest around it would turn blue. So I wasn't putting my hand over it. I was letting the water wash over it in the sand. Because the sun is so strong there, you would get an instant impression on the paper of that wave. So it was a real mark of time, and I was capturing nature in a way that I couldn't possibly do. To me, it felt like a living thing that I was capturing.

And they also change over time. The colors on these cyanotypes, with humidity and moisture, their colors evolve. So through making these cyanotypes, the solar signatures, I realized that's why the next step happened. Because for me, those are about embracing ourselves just as we are, all of our imperfections, without edit. So that really launched me toward buying a paintbrush and some paint. We lived in three different places while we were in New Zealand, and we lived at the top of the south island, somewhere called Ruby Bay, and that's where I bought the paint. I had access to more like an art store. I would just be in the garage of the place we rented, or outside painting, and it just kept going.

Then I painted the beach, and I would be in the back of the hatch of the car just painting wherever I could be with this view, and getting a little braver and a little braver. In the beginning, I wasn't trying to necessarily paint realistically, but I didn't even know where I wanted to start with painting. It really changed after we moved back. In New Zealand, I started adding paint into the cyanotype. Then we came back and probably the first year I was just painting from memory of what we saw and did and just the emotions, but they were definitely more landscape oriented. Then I just bought a sheet of raw canvas maybe a year ago, and just went for it. I started pouring paint and getting into this flow that I hadn't experienced before, that was just really, really free.

It was really because this canvas was so large and I was on the floor working. I wasn't standing at an easel. It wasn't this perfect pre-stretched canvas. This large scale, just me hovering over this painting, made a big difference. Then I will tack 'em up to the wall and do some more work to them that needs that surface and a different orientation. I find a lot of things coming forward, and it's a lot of not thinking about, I'm going to make, I don't know, you said a tree, but it might resemble a tree. It might have a shape of a leaf, or some things come forward in the work that are more organic shapes, that emotion and that freedom that feels so meditative, that I haven't been able to find in other mediums.

So I even brought it, we made this interview into a family trip. We brought our surfboards, we learned to surf in New Zealand, and so we're going to do that here in Maine, which we're so excited about. I rolled up some canvases that I started. Now I start them with cyanotype. So cyanotype has just become my, I started with photography. It's a photographic process. It's something where I found freedom and some self-acceptance through that process. I rolled up these canvases and I brought them, and I'm going to be working on them here. I brought paint and buckets. We are usually in Wells surfing. So it's all very similar, but that's where we'll be.

Lisa Belisle: One thing I'm really struck by is your ability to trust yourself. It started when you were in school and you were like, I'm not sure, but I'm going to take this class and I'm going to trust myself that this feels right and I'm going to go in this direction.

And then doing your social work, and then getting to the place where you made a decision, oh, I'm going to stay in with my kids now. This is the thing that I'm going to trust that I want to do. I'm going to trust that when I go to New Zealand, that's going to be the right thing. I'm going to trust that when I'm processing through things and my art is progressing, that that is the right thing. For people who work with other people, sometimes it's easy to get pulled into their energy and just let other people's expectations pull us in directions, because as you said early on, you were given a lot of credit for, oh, you're really good at taking care of children, which is a great gift, and it is wonderful to reward people for that. But the caregiving that you can be good at, you're right, that's very external to self. I love that you've been able to come back and say, I want to reflect internally now, and I want to create this art, and I want this to be the next thing that I am going to be focusing on. Which is amazing because I think it's so easy to continue to stay focused on things that other people value about us.

Mary Lynn Burke: Oh, totally. Absolutely. I agree with you a hundred percent. By the way, over a year ago now, I did return to social work, and I am doing therapy one or two days a week, because it is just part of who I am. I think it's that trusting your instincts. In therapy, in social work, and in a lot of aspects of my life, I have just trusted that I can do something. I don't know what the outcome's going to be. I can switch course. A lot of it too, working in the hospital, you don't know. Every day is different. Inpatient, you might see somebody for more than one day, maybe they're there for an extended stay, but really you just have a name and some information in a chart, and you are walking into their room and you introduce yourself and you instinctually have to know these are the resources.

I think that's what I loved. I loved this sort of, let's see what this person needs. Where are they at in life? What seems most highest priority for them? Those instincts, over the years, have been why returning to therapy has been really good for me as well, because I missed having that moment in therapy. What are they going to bring today? And being able to tap into all the tools, all the experience for what this person needs. Now I think that's coming through in art, but it's really what are the instincts I'm responding to in the studio?

And also how do I get myself into that place where I can cultivate the flow that I'm looking for, that mindset. There's a lot that doesn't just happen. I don't just walk in there and clock in and the marks start happening, and nothing's premeditated. So trust is big. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes you can feel stuck. You may not know what you're going to, I feel like I have to have a certain level of confidence to take this giant canvas. Even though it's not that perfectly stretched one, it's still this large, and it's the large pieces that have made me open up more than anything, because they're bigger than me. I feel like I can walk into this world. So the way that I approach it is similar to a lot of things.

I feel like I just kind of go headfirst into a lot of things in life, and then I figure out, okay, this is where I need to back off, or this is where I need to make an adjustment, but there's no judgment. So to be able to cultivate a judgment-free mindset is important. In social work, it's a judgment-free mindset I'm going in with, and I can give that to myself. I can allow myself that as well. I can accept all those parts and pieces. Music is big for me. Listening to music while I'm creating, if I have sounds of the beach and I'm at an outdoor location, it's just me and those sounds. But in my studio, music is big, and it's always when the voice cracks that gets me, that really just feels like that's where I get connected to that song or that artist.

You travel into those moments. You feel like you can relate to the emotion, even though that's not your story. It doesn't matter. So I hope that's what my art can do, those parts and pieces in my art that are the unplanned. I wouldn't say any of it's a mistake, but maybe the parts, because there's a piece that I made, Jasmine Crush, recently that I started out with a cyanotype, and as I was making it, I coincidentally made a tree in my mind, and it could resemble a tree. So that was the start of it. It was this big tall tree, and then another branch coming from the other top section. Then I thought, oh, well, now what do I do? There's some kind of recognizable shapes and forms here, and it's not my usual start to things.

So it was a puzzle. There was a little more of the mind in the work than usual, and there was a section that I kind of changed my mind about a little bit, and I covered it with this beautiful color, but I kept looking at this part. I can still see through to the other part, the layer underneath, and now it's my favorite part of the whole painting. It's kind of rectangular, and you may not even think about it if you're looking at it as a whole, but it's my favorite part. I think that's just how I look at things in life. Those are the best parts. The best parts are those adventures, the journeys, the fact that you may have fallen down, but you got back up and you have maybe some residual evidence.

Lisa Belisle: As you're talking, I'm thinking about, I don't do a lot of knitting, but I do a little bit of knitting probably because my mother and my grandmother, my grandmother in particular was a big knitter, and I definitely drop stitches all the time. I am not a perfect knitter. I also have come to really love the piece that I'm creating. I'll look back and I'll think about the things I was doing during the time that I was knitting at the place where I dropped that stitch and what was happening in my life at that time. So as you're describing your art and your thinking about the tree branch that's there, it feels really interesting to me because again, it touches with the living aspect of self.

Mary Lynn Burke: Yeah, I think there's a lot to say about what do we show the world? What do we try to hide? Vulnerability is a big topic that I explore in my work, and it's probably the topic I explore in my work. My work is always about vulnerability, and this thought about time, it's just going by too fast. My girls are growing so quickly and I'm turning 50 this year. My amazing parents are getting older. Things are just going by fast and it's vulnerable and we're emotional, and I think it's so important to show the world. It is nice to know you're not alone. So my work, I really want it to be accessible in that way, and I hope people can get that part, that sometimes when we think this is going to be really abstract and it's going to have this feeling. I never, ever can box myself in to what I'm going to create. Anytime that I've ever said, I want this work to be in these tones, in these colors, or have this energy, it's just whatever came forward and I have no idea. I really feel like I don't control that. It's a beautiful thing. This idea of authenticity and knowing ourselves, I think that's a hard thing to narrow down because it's changing so much, so often, and most of the time once the work is done, I stand back. I think to myself, I don't know where that came from. I know it's me. I know it's a reflection of me and all my experiences, but I could never have predicted that was what would come forward.

Lisa Belisle: And that's so powerful. Also for you in this simultaneous role that you do in therapy. That ability to bring your vulnerable self forward. Obviously it's in a different way than you do as an artist, but the ability to model that for the people, even if you say nothing about yourself or your art, which is typically what happens, I would imagine. But there is a sense that this is what you believe, and if people are sitting with you in that space, that's so powerful because I don't think that's something that is intuitive to many people.

Mary Lynn Burke: It's funny, I do virtual work. My husband bikes to and from work all year long. So we have the one car anyway. I have to be home in case the girls need something. It's great because before and after work, I'm right there in my studio. So I have a big painting always tacked up in my studio that's in progress or hasn't been stretched yet. It's behind me and I'm not mentioning my work and I'm not talking about myself, and it's a hundred percent about them. It's beautiful. It's exactly what I want to be doing. But I do feel like I am learning, I hope, as much as my clients are gathering and learning from these sessions.

I think that is the model, and I feel that maybe even having this kind of thing sitting behind me, it's sort of speaking in a way. I know for me, having its presence and I'm in my studio when I am doing these sessions, there's so much emotional inner workings and deep reflection happening in this space all the time. My girls love to laugh, we can hear you singing up there when I'm making the paintings. We can hear you. So I got the headphones on and I am at work, and it's just blissful. It's blissful to be able to be free like that. I would love to be able to teach that and model that in the world of art and outside of art making. Every decision, everything in life, instincts, that's creative. How you're going to spend your morning, how you're going to start your day, how you're going to set yourself up for some important meeting, what are you going to do to get ready for that? It's creative to think, and you have to pay attention to those patterns. It certainly isn't perfect for me, even though I know if I don't go exercise and get out in nature and do these certain things first thing, my day is not going to be the same. But some days we all have those voices that sleep longer, or sometimes you just need that. So I think prioritizing yourself is important.

Lisa Belisle: Well, it's really been a pleasure to spend time with you today. I've enjoyed hearing about your journey. And I want to reflect back to you something that I don't always do, but the sense of joy that I get from you and the fact that you're so fully embodying all these aspects of self and the time that you took to get to that place. I feel that from you in such a big way, and having seen your art, I feel like there's that sense of just this life that you bring forward. So I really appreciate you doing that.

Mary Lynn Burke: Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Lisa Belisle: I've been speaking with artist Mary Lynn Burke, and you can also appreciate the joy of her work through the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. I hope you'll come to one of our openings and meet her. She's a delightful individual. Maybe she'll bring her daughters and her husband back again, as I know she brought them last night to our opening. It's really wonderful to be able to explore creativity and the human spirit with wonderful humans like artist Mary Lynn Burke here on Radio Maine. Thank you for joining us.

Mary Lynn Burke: Thank you.