Diane Burko, The Per Contra Interview with Miriam N. Kotzin
PC: When did you start
making art?
DB: As a child I was drawing and painting. The first
paintings I did were paint by numbers sets, but instead of following the
numbered diagram, I just did my own thing on plain cardboard.
PC: When/how did you realize that art was going to be
at the center of your life—assuming that if it isn’t the center, it’s close
to the core?
DB: I was ambivalent about being an artist
professionally. I began taking art classes at the Brooklyn Museum in the
third grade and continued doing so in MOMA in junior high school. In high
school I returned to the Brooklyn Museum as a monitor in the night painting
classes. I then chose a college that would provide academic options and a
strong art department: Skidmore in Saratoga Springs, when it was still a
women’s college.
It was there that I decided I would devote my life to being an artist. I had
a mentor named Arnold Bittleman, who studied at the progressive Black
Mountain College and then Yale and was a protégé of Albers. He was a Jewish
man from the Bronx whose father was a butcher. He gave me permission and
courage to be an artist.
PC: How did your double major in art history and
painting? What periods did you find most congenial to your own vision? Did
you ever consider becoming an academic and teaching art history?
DB: By taking academic courses over the summer I was
able to double major in art history and painting. I was particularly
attracted to 19th and 20th century art, American and French.
Apres-midi
Oil on canvas
84 x 60 inches
March - May 1990
PC: What artists do you particularly admire?
DB: I definitely owe a great deal to Courbet, Manet,
Bonnard, Van Gogh, Cézanne as well as Augustus Vincent Tack and Winslow
Homer, Ryder, and Burchfield who provided me with my landscape/paint legacy.
As a student, and even today, I look to these masters.
Each reinforced for me the importance of searching out a vista, of sticking
to a motif in order to understand through paint, their particular mysteries
of light color, and design.
Of course, being an artist in the 21st century is quite different from the
19th when artists were confronting vistas, such as Edwin Church looking at
Cotapoxi for the first time, without seeing previews in National Geographic
or on the Discovery Channel.
Gorky, Philip Guston, Joan Mitchell, Susan Rothenberg, David Hockney and
John Walker are more contemporary inspirations.
PC: Who were the teachers or artists that had an
influence on your work? What have you done to keep their influence but
develop your own style? Was that conscious?
DB: Arnold Bittleman who studied with Joseph Albers
had the strongest influence on me. He introduced me to the magic of color.
That’s when I fell in love with Gorky Matta and Bonnard.
When I arrived at UPenn graduate school I was accepted on the strength of
abstract work. Therefore I begrudgingly must acknowledge the influence Neil
Welliver. I began to draw from nature, paint outside and develop a strong
affinity for the landscape, which provided content that allowed for
abstraction and the manipulation of paint.
FOOTPRINTS 1
30" X 3O"
Archival ink
jet Print
February 2009
PC: Sometimes people use categories for artists: an
American artists, or women artists. How do you feel about these tags? Are
they a nuisance?
DB: Categories for artists can be helpful when making
a political point however ultimately one’s practice speaks for itself.
PC: You've used aerial photography for a number of
paintings (The Grand Canyon, Pennsylvania's Waterways). How does that point
of view from above, affect your paintings?
DB: I became fascinated with aerial views that I first
collected from magazines like Arizona Highways and National Geographic. It
wasn’t until my 1977 flight with Jim Turrell over the Grand Canyon and Lake
Powell that I first took my own photographs, and then there was no turning
back. I have been flying over and recording landscapes for nearly 30 years!
Flying is exhilarating. Looking down over the landscape has always been my
preferred perspective, perhaps because I find it more abstract when the
horizon line is gone. I enjoy experiencing and presenting a disjunctive,
unexpected spatial point of view. That becomes to me more abstract, less
traditional and allows for more invention.
The most dramatic experience I ever had was in a small helicopter flying
with David Okita (who flew for the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory) over Big
Island. Strapped in but with the door removed, I was right there hovering
over molten lava spilling into the sea, with clouds of steam rising up, and
over deep skylights (openings through the hardening lava crust), and smoke
coming up from Kilauea. Some of my Iris prints capture that flight. Then
there was my three-hour, breathtaking flight from the south of Iceland, Hofn
over Jokolskarlon, Vatnajokull glacier, Askjar and onto Myvtn in the north
in 2002. The vast empty plains of lava and glacial ice were mind-boggling.
Early work, aerial farms, Grand Canyon, Waterways, all had a long view from
above in common. I think this method fed my need for abstraction. However it
seems more when intimacy entered my life in the 90’s, other points of view
were adapted. My residency in Giverny, and then in Bellagio where closer
encounters with the landscape, along the pond, or on an Etretat cliff, out
my studio window along Lake Leco or in a vineyard presented other viewpoints
to experience.
PC: How do you use photographic references in your
work? Has your use of photography for painting changed?
DB: In the seventies my sources were National
Geographic, calendars, Arizona Highway magazines. After flying with James
Turrell over the Grand Canyon I realized my own photographs could become my
own source material.
The photograph is an essential tool for me to record experiences. In the
studio, when I have returned from some adventure, the photograph also serves
as a reference. Over the years, I have developed a method of taking hundreds
of slides on site and then reviewing them in the studio. That process
entails my discarding a majority of them. I then consider scale of images
and sometimes take pieces from them to combine in a composition. I project
the slides onto the canvas and paint directly, loosely positioning elements
in terms of shapes of dark and light. Then the projector is turned off. I do
make a scan of the slide so I have a print for reference, but the colors and
even the position and shape of the elements change as the painting
progresses. Ultimately, the painting takes over.
(Readers can find examples of the photography on
Diane Burko's
Website -
http://www.dianeburko.com/work/works_prints.html )
PC: When did you start to use projected images in your
work?
DB: Some from commercial airplane windows 1970, but
then more seriously in 77’.
PC: You work in the studio, but sometimes, I believe,
en plein air. Do you have a work where you'd be able to show us the
progression from sketch or source photo to the finished painting?
DB: When I have the luxury of time at a location, I
paint en plein air. Giverny and Bellagio were the most extended times I had
to develop series of small on site work. For the most part my paintings are
developed from source photography.
PC: Many of your landscapes (the volcanoes, for
example) require travel. Do you ever say, "darn—or some variation—I wish
that while I was there that I'd..."?
Palami Pali
(October Flight, 2000) #5
Oil on canvas
60 x 96 inches
August 2001
DB: I enjoy geology, the history of the earth,
exploring the unknown. What I value most is the concept of wonder. To
stumble upon something that truly surprises and puts one in awe. Sometimes
that exploration means flying into craters, or over Denali, the Aleutian
chain, or climbing 5 hours up Stromboli to watch lava fireworks or to going
to the edge of cliffs, such as Etretat on the Normandy coast or the edge of
Vesuvius’ crater in Italy. Those experiences didn’t leave room for wanting
to acquire more than that.
I am always looking and consequently faced with a visual surprise when I
travel. In retrospect I realize that I most fully engage with views that
take my breadth away. I seek landscapes that challenge my imagination and
skills- they demand to be painted. My methods of documentation are adequate
to carry the vision to the canvas.
Palami Pali (October Flight, 2000) #5 - Detail
PC: You've done a number of paintings and photographs
that are series. What's the attraction of working like that?
DB: I believe I have always been a “serial painter”.
Meaning that painting for me is not just about making an image, but more
about the process of contemplating an idea of a subject. Developing and
structuring various aspects of that is what’s of interest?
An example of this approach would be the recent Matterhorn Icon Series.
PC: Some of your paintings are diptychs, others
triptychs. What is the significance of that choice?
DB: In a series of diptychs of historical visual
comparisons – I am contrasting past and present situations of glacial
activity.
PC: I suppose the largest of your paintings is the
mural for the Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia (2004, 12' X 32'). What should
we know about the size of your paintings, or your grouping a series together
(Matterhorn) so that, in effect, the viewer is invited to see them as a
single work?
DB: Correct.
PC: You've said about your photographic work,
"Photography allows me the freedom to create unconventional views of natural
spaces. With the lens I can closely examine the multifaceted, intricate
structures of nature’s ambiguous detail and capture movement and light in
real time.
Such opportunities result in more abstract, mysterious and magical
interpretations of natural phenomena in our environment."
Do you want to expand on that statement, contrasting with painting?
DB: I have always used photography as a tool to
capture the memory of a landscape. I now employ photography as a stand alone
medium in contrast to the images serving as catalysts for my paintings.
I am intrigued with the subtle digital manipulations of color and design.
The series of Iris prints (Iris being the name of the particular digital
printer used) represents that history of exploration from my first flight
with Jim Turrell in 1977, up to my most recent flights in the Pacific
Northwest in the summer of 2004 over Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Rainer, and Mt.
Baker.
My paintings are basically abstractions. The landscape becomes a vehicle for
me to explore formal juxtapositions such as scale - in terms of color,
shades of grays and browns with slivers of whites and silvers; contrasts of
surface, flat areas to squishy, thick impasto ones to large blank areas all
in one painting.
Aside from the physical and scale issues, I enjoy the ambiguity and
interchange between the ideas of abstract space versus real space. The
landscape provides this tension for me. The landscape also provides a level
of romance and meaning.
I enjoy the painting activity as well as the search for the image. I enjoy
the materiality of the paint as well as the materiality of the water, lava,
rock and mist. I enjoy presenting a vista as well as implying the history of
the earth.
Using the photograph as an intermediary keeps the abstraction in play with
my experience and my memory of the encounter.
PC: You have inkjet prints of your photographs and
you've made monotypes. I believe you've done some lithographs (e.g., Ile au
Haut, 1989). Did you do your own lithography?
DB: I am not a print maker, however over the years I
have been invited to collaborate with master printers. First in Tamarind NM
in 1980’s then in ASU. More recently at the Brodsky Center in Rutgers New
Brunswick.
PC: And one last question, maybe too complex for this
interview, regarding your photographs and the prints you make. Do you see
the work of art as being the image in the computer, or is it not complete
until it is on the paper? Certainly the size of the print and the type of
paper are variables and decisions that affect the work? What do you think?
DB: The computer is a tool used to mediate the
production of a photograph and its final printing.
PC: What do you think the artist's role—in particular,
your role—should be in relation to political issues?
DB: Politics of Snow is currently an on-going series
where my practice as a painter serves to document the rapidity of change in
our natural icons such as the Matterhorn, as well as the shrinking of
glaciers in America and Iceland. In a series of diptychs of historical
visual comparisons – I am contrasting past and present situations of glacial
activity.
I want to seduce the viewer with my painting of the landscape and then
subtly engage them in contemplating its survival. Beauty and desolation,
life and death all conflate for me at this moment in time as the concept of
mortality personally and globally dominate my creative impulse.
POLITICS OF SNOW EXHIBIT: LOCKS GALLERY February 2-March 13: QUADTYCH:
GRINNELL MT. GOULD,
#1, #2, #3, #4
Oil on canvas
88 x 200 inches
Quadtych OC, 88" x 50" each (88" x 200"), July
- October 2009
Grinnell Mt. Gould #1: 1938, after TJ Hileman,
GNP Archives
Grinnell Mt. Gould #2: 1981, after Carl Key, USGS
Grinnell Mt. Gould #3: 1998, after Dan Fagre,
USGS
Grinnell Mt. Gould #4: 2006, after Karen Holzer,
USGS
Politics of Snow Exhibit: Locks Gallery Philadelphia, February 2 - March 13,
2010
PC: Your current work involves collaboration with
scientists. Would you tell our readers something about how that
collaborative project came about and how it has developed?
DB: Seeing a painting of Grandes Jorasses done in 1976
juxtaposed in an exhibit of recent works based on Iceland and Volcanoes was
a revelation. Thirty years had changed me as an artist and person and I knew
there were changes to that Alpine peak. I began to read and engage in more
serious research on snow and ice and glaciers. Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field
Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change had just come out.
Although I had read her pieces in the New Yorker - this was a very important
book for me. With the aid of the Internet I was able to reach out to a vast
network of glacial geologists who taught me about “repeat photography” which
is the practice of recording in geological time the physical change of a
particular site. Their records go back to the 19th century.
Through discovering the National Snow and Ice Data Center and their “Glacier
Pair Inventory” with the help of their librarian, Kara Gergely, I found
amongst others, Matt Dolan, Bruce Molnia and Lonnie Thompson and Henry
Brecher to aid me in my project.
© 2005-2010 Per Contra: The International Journal of the Arts, Literature and Ideas