Butcher Rules
Stills from Burn, HD video with sound, 3:00, 2013
Elizabeth Leister Burn is inspired by the work of early abstract filmmakers such as female pioneer, Mary Ellen Bute, John Whitney, and Stan Brakhage. As a student studying painting, I was not exposed to these artists or this type of work. However, I was deeply influenced by line, shape and gesture in the work of Pollock, Gorky and Klee – seemingly static versions of these moving abstract films. As I began to teach and work in video, I learned about these filmmakers and their moving abstractions became wholly inspiring.
my traditional concerns as a painter - layering line, shape, texture and color with gesture and mark-making. While Brakhage painted and scratched directly onto the surface of the film, today it is possible to generate a wide range of shapes and marks within a software program and animate them using myriad shifts in size, color and speed. Each frame becomes a painting, and it is exciting to craft each composition and the transition that follows. The program also allows for erasing back through a series of layered strokes – an undoing of the digital painting, which interests me.
My approach to working with video includes a wide range of methods that merge the traditional with the digital. Drawing is an integral component in my work. I am interested in the drawn line in relationship to the projected image, and I often utilize this dichotomy as a metaphor for the relationship between the body and technology.
Burn started with high definition landscape footage shot in Southern California, near the school where I teach, after a raging wildfire decimated the area for miles in spring of 2013. Quick glimpses of burnt cacti and a horizon line emerge, but become consumed by painterly, scratchy abstract gestures of destruction. I’m drawn to this combi-
Burn is the first in a series of four videos that utilize painterly techniques, marking a return to
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