Take an audio tour of a 2022-23 exhibition at The Peale, Baltimore's Community Museum! Listen to artist Lee Boot chat about his show "Lee Boot: Abstracts & Artifacts," on view at The Peale from November 2022-January 2023. You can see videos and interact with more media files using Smartify, the ultimate cultural travel app! Includes 21 narrated stops.

Lee Boot (00:00): So now you should be standing in front of a video monitor that has films of paintings that I've done as they developed. This is something I've been doing since 2000, since 2001 when I started filming my painting of the Euphoria project, which I'm not showing here. Because you know, in those days, the, the, the video is just not very good. But you're seeing a bunch of different paintings. Some of them are in this show, some of them are not, as they develop. And why do I do this? I do this because I'm fascinated by the way a painters or an artist's intuition informs the decisions that they need to make to complete a painting. I mean, think about it. It's if you're writing a book or a poem or a song, or you're doing a painting, you know, in the arts, we rely on our intuition.

(01:06): It's really the only tool we have because science does not yet understand all the nuances of the human narrative and all the stories and interesting ways that human beings have of occupying this earth. The best way to access that is still through human intuition. You know, Shakespeare knew a thing or two about human behavior. It's, you know, we are humans, right? And so when I paint, when, when any painter paints, depending, you know, if they're, if they're painting in a very scripted way, in a very pre-planned way, this may be less the case. Although how they decide what to paint, could be very intuitive. But the kind of painting that you see here, which is sort of an abstract way of painting, not entirely though, because everything you're seeing here represents something in particular. So it's not, completely abstract work.

(02:10): But the language I'm using to describe it is quite abstract. And my intuition, when I get in a certain zone is making the decisions for me. It's telling me, no, that should be bigger, that should be more round, that should be blue. maybe you can get at this concept by creating this kind of shape. You know, your intuition is, in my opinion, the most fabulous thing that the human brain does on an intellectual level. You'll see in the other room, in the garden view room, the second room in this show, a little display about intuition, in a project that I did for the National Academy of Sciences. But these paintings, if you just watch them develop at different points.

Lee Boot (02:59): You'll see that these decisions just get made. And there's no rule book, there's no, there's no, script that I'm following. It's just, I'm listening to my intuition. I've learned to do that and to trust it. A lot of different folks use their intuition, not just artists. And this could be a film of almost any artist painting. I'm not putting myself up as some great painter here. I'm just saying this is a way to kind of see that process unfold.