Santa Fe, NM Winterowd Fine Art, March 22-April 3
This story was featured in the March/April 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art March/April 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
IN A SOLO show opening this March at Winterowd Fine Art in Santa Fe, NM, Albuquerque-based artist Charlie Burk invites art lovers to view nature—and painting—with a fresh perspective. The show, entitled Journey in Abstraction, opens on Friday, March 22, with an artist’s reception at 5 p.m., when more than a dozen oil paintings are unveiled.
Those who stand before Burk’s large-scale, sometimes mural-size works might feel a little bit like a field mouse tunneling through dense, colorful grasslands. In his paintings, the artist offers us not a bird’s-eye view of the landscape, but rather, ground-level examinations of long, tensile reeds and grasses. Luminous and meditatively arranged, they gradually shift in color across the picture plane in complex, prismlike hues. In the backgrounds, Burk occasionally adds a hint of the sky, a few clouds, even the gentle slope of a mountain. “They are natural shapes, and people relate to them because they’re familiar,” the artist says about his imagery, which he describes as abstract and nonspecific in nature. “It all comes out of my head,” he adds. “My work isn’t sentimental or nostalgic. To me, that’s the definition of abstraction—not painting things as we remember them or wish to remember them, but just getting lost in the craft of painting.”
For several decades, the artist worked in watercolors in a photo-realistic style. Even then, his paintings were nontraditional, he says. “I always saw abstraction in the real world. I’d paint close-ups of wood textures and openings in fences, and I did grass then, too.” When he switched to oils in the late 1990s, says Burk, “I became more and more abstract.” For the artist, now 72, the creative process revolves almost exclusively around the textures, shapes, and colors he builds on his expansive, white-panel surfaces. Given their considerable size, each panel is attached to a rod that Burk can lower or raise incrementally on his studio wall as he works his way through the different areas of a composition. He uses a variety of brushes to apply his paint, and intermittently, he also dabs paint away with a rag or bit of newspaper, leaving behind spontaneous patterns. As he works, his imagery emerges extemporaneously. Painting, says Burk, is like playing the violin. “Once you learn to play, you can start improvising. It’s a very comfortable style that I have now.” —Kim Agricola
contact information505.992.8878www.fineartsantafe.com
This story was featured in the March/April 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art March/April 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
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