Featured Artist for January 1998

Featured GiveAway by Thomas Burke A Summer Dance, Oil on Wood, 14" x 20", 1993 Valued at $600

D. K. Parker West Winfield , NY

A Summer Dance has a lushness about it; a full body like a very fine wine. On a July morning, Tom was out walking in the fields where he paints. The day was hot and still with very little movement of anything. He came over a small hill and saw this grouping of trees. A breeze was moving through the grouping making the leaves seem to dance. He said it was very unusual because everything else around the grouping of trees remained still.


Meet the Artist

Tom was born in Indianapolis on October 5, 1948. His mother was an artist and her father was a craftsman who worked with wood in Canada. He knew he wanted to be an artist at a very young age and spent most of his childhood drawing and working with clay. He considers himself a sculptor at heart and thinks of the painted surface as a low relief sculpture.

He actually lived in St. Louis for awhile where ArtQuest is located. He went to Washington University's graduate school for a semester. In fact, he has quite a distinguished education. A Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing in 1977 from the City University of New York, Queens College and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Education with a 72 hour concentration in painting and sculpture from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

He also has quite a lot of experience in the classroom. He was a part time Professor at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania teaching painting, watercolor, drawing, design, and sculpture. He's now an Adjunct Professor is all aspects of the Studio Program at Allentown College in Center Valley, Pennsylvania. He's also an Adjunct Professor for other colleges in Pennsylvania like Northampton Community College in Bethlehem; East Stroudsburg University in East Stroudsburg; and Lehigh County Community College in Schnecksville. He also teaches at a couple of local schools and is presently looking for a full time teaching job nationally. His undergraduate work at Indiana University centered on the knowledge of techniques in the visual arts. This included the technical aspects of painting and composition as well as sculpture and casting. Specifically, the traditional and experimental techniques of sculpture, drawing, painting, and the physical properties of the various media. During his graduate study at CUNY - Queens, he continued his technical development and was exposed to the theory and history of the visual language.

Since graduate school, his work has evolved both technically and theoretically. Some years ago, he began to experiment with producing his own paints. He has accumulated a sizable body of knowledge which he enjoys sharing with his students.

Some of his commissions reside in permanent collections in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Madrid. His gallery affiliations include Synchronicity Space, New York City, New York; The Snow Goose Gallery in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; and DDC Fine Arts in Montclair, New Jersey.

He works off 3/4" birch panels that are gessoed with true gesso. The gesso mixture is taken from a 13th century Italian recipe. After the gesso dries, he sands and polishes it. The polished surface is mirror like and helps depart a glow to the painted surface. He also grinds his own paint using a recipe based on Rubin's jelly and black oil. He feels the combination of jelly, black oil and polished gesso on a wooden panel really make the surface glow. If it's done right, the painting will have a surface shine that is much like a paint job on an expensive European car. He has a strong love for the Northern and Southern Renaissance techniques and is always interested in finding more recipes to investigate. He believes one of the hardest things to remember is that a technique is only a means to an end and it can not control the spirit of the work. He looks at the technique as a tool to help articulate an idea or mood.

A Gray Dance (16" x 18") is oil on wood and was painted in September of 1994. He actually painted this scene a couple of times. In fact, he's been working in this same area for more than 17 years. Each time he goes to this spot, it's like visiting an old friend. He says it's nice to see the changes but it is also nice to be familiar with its basic structure. On this particular day, it was early Fall with the color in the leaves just starting to show. The sky was overcast and the moods of autumn were just beginning.

Asking Tom to send me some thoughts on his work, he said "I've always thought if you had to verbalize about your work, you've failed." Insight into the work is so very important and Tom does have insight into nature. He feels the painting should just speak for itself. However, why the painting came into existence and why it was painted sometimes needs explaining. When he's painting, everything makes sense; the world is right and he has direction. Only when he's painting does he feel he has control over his environment. He continues, "In a way, painting is like sex. The focus and intensity on one thing to the exclusion of all else is hypnotic. You feel the connection with nature in a unique way and all distractions fall away." He's painted hundreds of paintings outdoors in the same area of Pennsylvania and he can remember each day, its mood, the noises, and the smells a day can produce.



Landscape Remembrance (10" x 10") is mixed media on paper and painted in his studio in February 1993. He's been painting outdoors for so long that he can see the designs of nature when he closes his eyes. In the winter, when it's just too cold to go outside, he tries to use this information. He enjoys working with images that represent a memory. A memory or dream of a day that is long past. One of the first things that fall away in a dream is detail and what takes over is a collective image or impression that the day left. Both Landscape Remembrance and Sacred Mountain below where conceived in this manner.

Strong Haze (12" x 12") is an oil on wood and created in July 1994. This particular painting has a bent surface. Meaning the picture plane is not flat, but bends toward the viewer. When he first started this, the bending was severe, but as he adjusted to the effects of the warping planes they became more subtle. It is an interesting twist to have the picture plane physically advance or recede as the illusions of the paint advance and recede. As he paints on these surfaces, he becomes keenly aware of each shifting plane on the painted surface advancing and falling back as you walk by it. If his paintings could physically change value and chroma based on bending planes and the angle at which they were seen, maybe the viewer would question more closely the painted image itself. Working with the bending planes has fundamentally altered his relationship with the landscape and the picture plane.

At heart, he's a sculptor and bending the surface helps him use some of the language of sculpting. What he hopes will happen is that the viewer sees the piece from a distance, does not notice the bend and only becomes aware of it as he or she begins to move in on the painting. He says the hard part is finding a motif to fit a bending surface. On this particular day, he had put a bending panel in his car, then went painting. The day was cool and foggy and he got out early in the morning to paint. While he was walking in a particular field, he saw this grouping of trees seem to come out of the fog from nowhere. As he moved past them, they fell back into the fog. As soon as he saw that, he thought of the bent panel back at the car. He spent the rest of the morning working on this painting.






About The Artist

As a painter, he wears two hats. He works in landscapes and still life. His early landscapes reflect the American tradition of luminosity. His studies of color theory led to the evolution of a style more aligned with expressionism. Recently, hand ground paints have allowed him to intensify his palette and incorporate texture into his painting. All the landscapes are done in the tradition of plein air, premier-coup style. Plein air landscape painting is an interesting opportunity to formulate a language which pays attention to form but does not lose the sensuality and expansiveness of nature. It is the balance between the two, form and emotion, that interests him.

It has taken him twenty five years to develop a personal style of plein-air painting. Like many art students coming out of the late sixties and early seventies, he was trained in abstract expressionism. He believes in the pursuit of the emotions of paint and also believes that marks and patterns produced on a canvas should direct the viewer to a distilled icon of an image or idea. Over the years, he began to realize abstraction could not stand alone but needed an image. Realism by itself lacked energy and needed the rawness of expressionism. Working in nature at a given moment combined the two worlds nicely for him. His work swings from pure muscle paintings to controlled observed studies of nature. As he works outside, he is evolving a compositional language with each painting. As nature evolves, the paintings evolve. It is a special moment when one first hears a stream increase or decrease its flow much like a pulse or when one first becomes aware of how vast the spatial orientation in nature really is. It is his ability to feel the tensions in nature which makes painting outside so exciting. He finds himself trying to create order and a delicate balance from the chaos in nature. This act alone can disclose fundamental qualities of human consciousness in a unique way. It is the generating flow of consciousness and the evolving pictorial metaphors present in plein-air painting that make it such a meaningful and exciting struggle. Each time he goes outside to paint, he is looking for a one-to-one experience with nature that will cause a restructuring of his pictorial language.



Late Fall - Red (10" x 12") is an oil on wood created in November 1995. This work is a dark painting, lush but dark. It was painted on a cold day with light wind and rain falling. Hunters where moving around the fields and he felt compelled to paint fast or die.



He also has a background in sculpture and casting and has worked for a number of years as a biomedical sculptor at Indiana University Medical Center. He's worked closely with the Anatomy, Pathology, and Plastic Surgery Departments developing three-dimensional, anatomical simulators. One of his primary duties was to develop casting techniques using jeltrate, silicone molding material, rubber latex, and simple plastics to cast specimens from surgery which are then hand painted. This was accomplished by observing surgery and working with cadavers to gain insights into muscular movement and structure. Recently, he developed a HIV model for a VAST (Values in Science and Technology) course on AIDS at Lafayette College. The knowledge acquired during this work has been a great asset in teaching sculpture, drawing and the painting of figures. His work appears in a publication, "Dissection Casts of the Human Brain", in the American Journal of Anatomy, June 1975 in collaboration with Dr. Fix and C. Gosling.


Sacred Mountain (9" x 10") is an oil and gold leaf on wood painted in March 1995. It was a studio effort that came from a collection of paintings done from this motif. The track of land is used by hunters in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. Needless to say, he tried not to visit this place during hunting season. In early summer, its quiet and beautiful. He has painted this specific area in the rain, early morning, in heat waves, and in light snow, you name it and he's painted in it. It has become a touch stone for his landscapes. In an effort to make this image more precious or to see it as a personal icon, he's included gold leaf for the sky. The gold made the sky glow in low light. It is a beautiful work to look at in the early evening light.







Selected Exhibitions

1996 Fall Group Show, "Artist of Northeast Pa", The Gallery, Northampton Community College, Bethlehem, PA
1996 Fall Group Show, "The Sacred Mountain and Other Vistas", The Maria Feliz Gallery, Jim Thorpe, PA
1995 Fall Group Show, "The Sacred Mountain and Other Vistas", The Maria Feliz Gallery, Jim Thorpe, PA
1995 Fall Group Show, "The Art Of Plein-Air Painting", The Gallery, Northampton Comm College, Bethlehem, PA
1994 Fall Two Person Show, DDC Fine Arts, Montclair, New Jersey
1994 Fall Jury Selection Award, Synchronicity Space, New York, NY
1994 Fall Group Show, Contemporary Landscape Painting, The Gallery, Northampton Comm College, Bethlehem
1994 Spring Two Person Show, DDC Fine Arts, Montclair, NJ
1994 Winter Group Show, Synchronicity Space, New York, NY
1993 SummerGroup Show, Maria Feliz Gallery, Jim Thorpe, PA
1993 Summer Group Show, Mendelson Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA
1993 Spring One Man Show, DDC Fine Arts, Montclair, NJ
1992 Fall One Man Show, Northampton Community College, Bethlehem, PA
1992 Spring One Man Show, Lafayette College, Easton, PA
1991 Winter Group Show, "The Easton Circle", The Gallery for the Center of the Arts, Easton, PA
1988 Fall One Man Show, University of Arkansas at Little Rock
1988 Winter Group Show, "Artists Who Teach", Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA
1988 SpringTwenty-first Juried Show, Juror: Monique Beudert, Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA
1987 Fall Group Show, East Stroudsburg University, East Stroudsburg, PA
1985 Fall One Man Show, Cedar Crest College, Allentown, PA
1984 Fall Group Show, Participated with Ed Kerns, Ron Janowich, Larry Fink, Lafayette College, Easton, PA
1984 Spring 19th Juried Biennial Exhibition, Jurors: Vivian Endicott, Allen Rosenbaum, Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA
1984 Spring Group Show, Leonarda Di Mauro Gallery, New York, NY
1983 Spring Group Show, Joanna Dean Gallery, New York, NY
1982 Fall 69th Annual Exhibition, Jurors: Harvey Dinnerstein, Paul Burns, Beatrice Jackson, Allied Artists of America, Inc., New York, NY
1982 Spring 18th Juried Biennial Exhibition, Jurors: Anne D'Harnoncourt, John R. Lane, Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA
1981 Fall 68th Indiana Artists Show, Jurors: Robert Pincus-Witten, Indianapolis Art Museum, Indianapolis, IN
1978 Winter - 1979 Fall Participated in 2 one man shows plus all group shows, Painting/Drawings, First Street Gallery, New York, NY
1977 Fall - 1980 Spring Participated in the 30th New England Exhibition, Juror: Irving Sandler, Silvermine Guild of Artists, Inc. New Canaan, CT
1979 Winter Annual Juried Exhibition, Juror and Guest Curator: Lawrence Alloway, Queens Museum, Flushing, NY
1977 Spring One Man Show, Painting/Drawing, Queens College, Flushing, NY
1973 Summer One Man Show, Painting/Drawing, Indiana State Art Show, Indianapolis, IN