We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Saidy Gabriela Burch a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Saidy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

At the start of the pandemic, I was admittedly happy to have a much more substantial amount of time to myself. I was excited to be able to concentrate on creative projects–drawing, writing, and dipping my toes into songwriting–without the concern of social events hovering over my head. As time passed, however, I found that this lack of social interaction began to wear on me–something I didn’t recognize for a very long time throughout the pandemic, and something I certainly did not expect as a total introvert.
Without invitations to social events, the pandemic removed any pressure from me to initiate conversation–something I blindly mistook as a good thing.
It took me many months, but eventually I came to the realization of a love for something I hadn’t acknowledged before: people.
This realization was catalyzed by my reading of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, which illustrated to me the stunning beauty of people’s individuality.
It was a stepping-away from work solely focused on my own thoughts and emotions, and an step into the recognition of EVERYBODY’S beauty; little things especially–voice inflections, little hand-centric mannerisms, how people’s eyes dart around the room…

I’m grateful to the period of isolation brought out by the pandemic because it gripped my head and forced me to look at the significance of other people in the eyes.

From then on there was a marked shift in my artistic focus: away from art solely focused on my own thoughts, and towards a union of my own perceptions AND the thoughts and emotions of others.
This spurred a series of paintings, which I continue today, heavily inspired by people I have observed in my daily life–their headspaces, converged with that of the observer.

Saidy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m visual artist, writer, and amateur musician. I’m currently majoring in mathematics and creative writing!

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been drawn to creative work. I owe a lot of my progress to my awesome parents (who very graciously tolerated nine year-old-me insisting that I absolutely needed “professional” colored pencils to draw dragons…which really looked more like deformed horses).

Something I’ve always loved to think about is the interconnectedness of different disciplines!

I like to see subjects–mathematics, visual arts, music, creative writing–as tinted lenses; colored glasses through which we perceive the world.
Say there stands before you a wood table. You’re wearing pink lenses. It’s a table, you observe, albeit a pink one. A man next to you wears green lenses. He agrees it’s a table, but his perception of it is quite undeniably greener than yours. These lenses give you and your green-lensed friend different perspectives on a common, underlying objective reality. You are not incorrect in asserting that you are looking at an object that is a table–and neither is he. But your perception of this table–and, consequently, how you would express further thoughts about this table and analyze this table–differ.

This idea can be extended to more abstract concepts–the feeling of melancholy, let’s say. This may be understood from a clinical, neuroscientific perspective–but also, for example, through a painting (Van Gogh’s “Wheat Field with Crows”…DANG!), or through a piece of music (SHOEGAZE!!!).

I find these colored lenses gripping, and I aim to shed light on them through my work.
I think it’s critical that we recognize the simultaneous validity of these various disciplines, and how studying them in union can lead us to a greater, more whole understanding of our world.

I don’t want to get too specific right now, but I have a lot of plans for future multimedia projects! I’m pretty excited to share them with everybody!!

Something that really informs my work, and that has in part inspired my passion for multi-disciplinary ideas, is synesthesia. Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon describing atypical connections between people’s senses. In my case, I perceive music as having distinct shapes and colors, and see letters and numbers as possessing certain colors (for example, the letter “S” is and always has been, to me, a sky-blue), among some other examples.
My synesthetic experiences are very present in my work! Often, I find myself illustrating in colors and shapes according to music I listen to.

In my work, I incorporate many different disciplines. In my acrylic paintings, for example, you’ll find shapes and colors inspired by music, poems, binary code, hexadecimal, parametric equations, and other little secrets! I like to have fun with pieces, and just kind of see where they go; if my paint drips when I didn’t mean for it to, I keep it in the piece! If my brush’s bristles are getting flayed, I’ll finger-paint!

I work in a variety of media, and am happy exploring lots of artistic subjects!
I take many different kinds of commissions from clients–paintings, album covers, shirt designs, digital character art, etc., and I’m always excited to collaborate with other artists! I absolutely love putting heads together with other creators and seeing what crazy things we can come up with.

: Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I’d say my central mission is to make people think critically about the world around them. I believe we live in a culturally tumultuous time, in which we’re encouraged to quickly brand people as either “good” or “evil”, depending on a certain few beliefs. I want to encourage understanding among people. I want to encourage people to step outside their comfort zone and resist pressure to go with the crowd. I want to encourage people to not demonize others because they disagree on politics, or religion, or societal norms.
I want to encourage people to pursue the truth above all else.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

The primary example that comes to mind is unlearning “art for the algorithm”. Social media is a difficult, complicated topic. I’m both grateful to it for the small platform I’ve grown, and dissatisfied with its effects on artists.
A hole I fell into for a few years was feeling trapped by social media algorithms. For a while, I felt as though creating art with mass appeal was my top priority; my eyes had become almost solely focused on growing my platform and getting known. And although this focus on palatable, social media-friendly art was helpful in growing an audience, I lost sight of why I was creating art. I began to operate like a factory, pumping out products produced by artificial limbs. My only concern became grabbing the attention of people scrolling on their phones, rather than expressing myself and creating something meaningful.

It was a while before I broke out of this, but I’m happy to say that social media is now absent from my process of creating pieces! If social media deems my art uninteresting, so be it!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @stargazingrainstorms
• Twitter: @StargazingRain