Hypergraphia is “a behavioral condition characterized by the intense desire to write or draw.” While I have by no means been diagnosed by a doctor with this condition, it surely does feel relevant to my world experience. For as long as I can remember drawing has been a compulsion, a soothing balm, a fervent desire. For my adult life I have maintained jobs as a production artist in all kinds of media fields, and made my own personal art in my downtime. In 2025 I enlisted the help of a hypnotist to work with me on developing the Audacity to be a full-time artist. Without a doubt, fear of rejection was my bogeyman, my easiest way to avoid chasing my true dream. What became fascinating as 2025 developed, was that drawing, as often as possible, was a wonderful way to offset that fear and anxiety. I found that if I finally allowed myself to draw in public, in social situations, in the car, on the train, everywhere, that this would allow me to feel comfortable in otherwise uncomfortable moments, and allow me to stay longer and interact more than if I wasn’t drawing. For years I was fighting the urge to compulsively draw, thinking it was somehow a bad look, socially unacceptable. I told myself a lot of lies.
In April of 2025 I started a 3 month residency at the Brooklyn Navy Yards with a rotating cadre of other artists, all of us sharing our own corners of an open space. The solidarity and collaboration I found there were invaluable. My most common approach to making art had been to create in my home, with very few people seeing the developments or even knowing I was there. This was safe and had it’s own value for a great deal of time, but it had reached it’s end. I have discovered how much I enjoy sharing my art with the world, how much I enjoy serving a function in the community as an artist. I feel seen. It’s been a wild transition to delibertly cloister myself and then step out into the “light”. I’m delighted it’s occurred.
During this time I developed the artistic practice of Hypergrafia, an intensive exploration of my unconcious using repetition and iterations of my expanding alphabet of symbols.
In Summer 2025 I was working on a series of x100 19x12 tagboard drawings in acrylic that focus around Phrases and symbols, creating poetic objects as a result. The phrases, glyphs, symbols, icons etc come from a growing library of forms i am tending like a garden. I record street signs, typography, mascots, branding, snatches of conversation, iconography from museums and screen shots from the internet in sketchbooks, then revisit and reinterpret them through multiple iterations. The forms gradually move further from their source material each time I redraw them, but I am fascinated by their provenance of meaning. They were all meant initially to communicate something, to convey an idea, a letter, a concept. By recontextualizing them and overlapping them, juxtaposing them etc I am trying to communicate my perspective on the world, to get people to see how I see, and connect to both the creators of the images by re engaging with their work as well as the viewers of my own work.
These drawings and more are available for shipping. Prices range from $150- $300. Reach out at josbur@gmail.com
