Timothy Burns
Red Sun / Blue Trees
Copper plate hand sanded in two directions. Torn cotton cheese cloth was then laid on surface and lightly sprayed with fine gold acrylic, indian yellow hue acrylic, and red acrylic. When almost dry, the cheese cloth is pulled away, leaving a net pattern. The plate was then allowed to dry overnight.
Three very heavy layers of inkAID Clear Gloss Type II were then applied.
Printed the trees and sun on the Epson 7880, edge to edge.
Click image for a larger vi
Hidden / Revealed
Using ball grained aluminum, (sold for litho printing), I applied with a foam brush 6 layers of Titanium White acrylic.
This was followed with some underpainting with bronze iridescent acrylic, inkAid White Matte, and then tinted with one coat of red fluid acrylic.
Printed on an Epson 7880.
It was then finished with some minor overpainting and sharpie work and then coated with two coats of Golden Artist Colors Gel Gloss topcoat and one coat of Semi-Gloss topcoat.
Seeing Stones
Ball grained aluminum with multiple coats of titanium white acrylic.
Followed by three coats of inkAID White Matte.
Printed on the Epson 7880.
Top coated with 3 coats of Golden Artist Colors Gel Gloss topcoat.
Meditation On Blue
Ball grained aluminum with multiple coats of titanium white acrylic.
Followed by 3 coats of inkAID White Matte.
Printed on the Epson 7880.
The three gold rectangles are comprised of fine gold acrylic paint over red acrylic paint.
Top coated with 3 coats of Golden Artist Colors Gel Gloss topcoat.
I have been an artist in photography, video art & performance art, and since 1994 in printmaking, showing in regional, national and international exhibits. My work of the last few years has involved the exploration of printmaking and painting as a hybrid medium of expression.
For me, photography is another way to create images. My Dad gave me a 35 mm camera when I was 11, as I was constantly ‘borrowing’ his whenever I could get my hands on it; when I was 13 I entered my first photography contest.
Later all through Viet Nam and four years in the military I carried a camera and, when I could, a small sketch book – both as a way of interpreting what was happening to me and those around me, and to distance myself from it.
I exhibited photography off and on until I began a career in cinematography and video in the late seventies and received a Master of Art in 1979 from the University of Missouri-KC. I taught video and film production at Haskell Indian Nations University and later at Northern Illinois University. By 1986, bored with documentaries and commercial video production and seeking to return to the single image, I started a graduate program in studio art, while keeping my day job of producing educational programs in the arts. I found myself taking additional course work in photography and worked with traditional printmakers in video documenting their workshops and classes.
Upon gaining my MFA, I a took a ‘fun’ course in printmaking, and it was an epiphany in the studio: working the plates, inking, and pulling prints transported me out of the normal world and totally into image making. A wholly different tradition of the single image, a completely new toolset and way of seeing changed my perceptions of what my art was about. This was in 1992, and led to 18 hours of post-grad work with intaglio and relief techniques at Northern Illinois University and elsewhere. Until this time all my experience with printmaking was in documenting the work of others.
Today my work references the textures and patterns in nature often with barely revealed symbols and signs. In the series of abstract images “Visual Traces of Meditation” I tried to delineate the mediative process and journey that occurs when I create. While largely concerned with the interactions of light, color and texture via the use of inks, paint and metals, I find the intense concentration of image-making to be an interesting subject itself, and I explored that thought with those works.
The core problem with a biography is that one often tries to make one’s life into a coherent story and by doing so the reality of it gets lost or hidden. So here is some of the incoherence.
The essence of my life has been change. We moved a lot when I was growing up, Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri, San Antonio, Texas, then later I lived in San Antonio again, Clovis, New Mexico, Saigon, Tucson, near Sacramento, California, then Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois. I’ve worked in Manilla, Buenos Aires, Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Sicily, and so on. Change and changes.
As an undergraduate at University of Missouri-Columbia I first majored in Literature – trying to find life’s answers in Dostoyevsky to Nabokov, Euripedes to Pliny, with doses of Thomas Pynchon, Sherwood Anderson, Burroughs [both of them] and Robert A. Heinlein as the principle directions. None of this explained Viet Nam and what I did there. However Claude Levi-Strauss led me to another area: culture.
Increasing my stay in the undergrade world was a last-minute-almost-graduated-switch to Anthropology. And while another 22 hours in it didn’t answer any personal questions about life, the Universe, and everything, I did realize that the one ‘common to all cultures at all times’ elements was artistic expression. Pottery shards and their decor, wall paintings, mosaics and the like are the bread and butter of cultural and classical anthropology/archaeology.
I found myself back into art; I still find myself in art.
-Timothy C. Burns
