Canadian artist Bobbie Burgers has spent much of her career returning to flowers, not as static objects of beauty, but as subjects in a continual state of change. Growth, decay, imperfection and renewal run through a practice in which floral forms move between recognition and abstraction, becoming increasingly layered, fragmented and emotionally charged.
Based in Vancouver, Burgers draws particular inspiration from the rhythms of her own garden and from the cycles that govern the natural world. Flowers at the point of fading or decay hold particular significance for her, representing a moment when beauty becomes more individual and less controlled. This tension between abundance and deterioration, delicacy and disorder, gives her paintings their distinctive energy.
Her process is similarly fluid. Rather than beginning with sketches or predetermined compositions, Burgers allows each work to develop through instinct, layering and response. Washes, brushstrokes, areas of dense material and moments of openness accumulate as one decision informs the next. Working across several canvases simultaneously allows compositions to move beyond the boundaries of an individual painting, creating a sense that forms might continue beyond the edge of the canvas.
Increasingly, Burgers’ practice has also become self-referential. Details from completed paintings are photographed, enlarged and incorporated into collages, while those works on paper can subsequently provide the starting point for new paintings. In her 2026 exhibition Lightning Running Through, this cyclical process was explored through ideas of propagation, connection and regeneration, allowing previous works to become material for what followed.
This ongoing exploration follows a significant period in Burgers’ career, including her 2026 exhibitions Lightning Running Through at Nicholas Metivier Gallery and Assembly at Burnaby Art Gallery, alongside an extensive exhibition history across Canada and internationally.
For The Flux Review, Burgers discusses her enduring fascination with flowers, the influence of her Vancouver garden, the freedom of collage, painting without a blueprint and why beauty, for her, becomes more compelling when it is allowed to coexist with disorder.
Flowers have been a recurring subject throughout your career. What continues to bring you back to them?
The way that they are constantly in movement and evolution, never static. They change, grow and then decay, and I’ve always been fascinated by how that process of decay brings them to their fullest expression of self. Things become more unique as they become less perfect.
How has spending time in your Vancouver garden affected the paintings you are making now?
My garden is an ever-present reminder of the seasons and is a great source of inspiration, not only from looking at it, but through the act of tending it. All the rhythms of the seasons are present in how you take care of a garden: planting, re-seeding, watching new growth and careful pruning, and eventually gathering leaves, spreading compost and letting it die to feed next year’s plants. These acts are a time of meditation for me and allow for reflection and contemplation that naturally show up in my work.
Your work moves between recognisable floral forms and abstraction. How do you decide what a painting needs to retain of its original subject?
It’s not so much a conscious decision as it is a natural evolution of years and years of working. I used to paint from life, literally bringing flowers into the studio as references, but after years of reinterpreting the same subjects, I no longer use any references. These forms are ingrained in my memory, and their imperfect translation into each new work naturally creates a sort of abstraction.
For Lightning Running Through, you made new works from enlarged details of earlier paintings. What becomes possible when you treat an existing work as the beginning of another?
This is a process I now use across almost all my work, bouncing between canvas and works on paper, using printed details of paintings as bases for collages, and then those collaged compositions as references for paintings. It’s very cyclical, and this sort of self-reference allows me to explore and push while remaining visually grounded in my practice.
How does working with collage change the decisions you make compared with working directly on canvas?
Collage is a very freeing process because you can take back decisions. In painting, at least the way I paint, once a brushstroke is down, it’s very hard to erase completely, so there’s an edge of danger that at any moment the piece could go sideways. With collage, you can put things down, consider them, remove them and change them as much as you like before committing. I think this freedom allows me to get to more unexpected places sometimes, but you can also get trapped in that procrastination of decision-making.
You often work on several canvases at once. What kind of conversation develops between them in the studio?
Yes, I often work across a series of 4–7 canvases at a time. When I’m painting in this way, I view the series as a single piece, so it’s less of a conversation between discrete entities and more of a flow between them. By painting in series, I feel I can break out of the confines of each canvas’s composition, so even when you break them apart into single pieces or diptychs, they each end up having a sense of expansion rather than containment.
You have written about beginning a painting without a sketch or blueprint. What tells you where to make the first mark?
Because my work is a product of layering, each new layer must respond to the one beneath. It starts with a series of washes that dry and settle into unpredictable forms, then the first few brushstrokes, then decisions about where the focal points should sit and the overall composition. It’s all about the decisions along the way and how you respond to what’s happened already, so any sort of sketch or blueprint would be moot.
Your paintings can feel abundant and unsettled at the same time. How do you think about beauty alongside disorder?
For me, beauty is almost meaningless without a counterpoint. I love playing with abundant colour and layers of delicate washes, but you also need moments of muddied paint, broken lines and built-up material, a bit of an edge. This also goes back to the subject matter: beauty and delicacy alongside decay.
After Lightning Running Through and Assembly, what questions are occupying you in the studio now?
After a show, I go right back to work, but I often don’t know the direction until later. You kind of start working and push through, and then a theme seems to catch on and develop as I build towards the next show. So, in short, I don’t know completely, but as we move into autumn, I’m interested in something darker and moodier.
