Current or Recent Events and Reviews
By Bill Van Siclen, The Providence Journal,
Thursday, July 28, 2011
“Trent Burleson: Birds and Other Metaphors” (through Aug. 17) brings together about 30 paintings by an artist whose work suggests a cross between Salvador Dali and John James Audubon, with a little Maxfield Parrish thrown in for good measure. Granted, it’s an unusual combination, especially when Burleson makes an occasional foray into Renaissance art (notably in a series of portraits that channel the likes of Botticelli and Raphael). Fortunately, Burleson, who’s a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, has the painting chops — and the classical training — to pull it off.
ARTES MAGAZINE
New York Art Critic, Ed Rubin, Takes to the Road for a Sampling of New England Country Living
Discovering the Hidden Treasures of Newport, Rhode Island
Posted on 26 July 2011 | By Edward Rubin
On the contemporary scene, during my early June visit, I viewed still-current, solo exhibitions by artist China Blue and Trent Burleson, whose work occupies the museum’s largest gallery, with around 22 bird paintings, most dated 2010. This uber-prolific artist is obviously a factory unto himself! Many of his birds soar in full flight, diving for berries and insects amid beautifully-rendered foliage. Though reminiscent of Audubon, they are post modern in their soft colored tones and slightly blurred execution. Viewing Burleson’s paintings, as museum curator Nancy Whipple Grinnell suggests, is as though we are seeing them “through a gossamer veil.” His exhibition ends August 17th.
Boston Phoenix
Review: Tom Wolfe at The NMAI and Trent Burleson at the NAM
By GREG COOK | July 12, 2011
Burleson's painting Renaissance Beauty is a bust of a golden-skinned woman with blonde braids bunched on the sides of her head. She stares as us with clear blue eyes. In the background, gold clouds float in patches of blue sky over mountains. The allure of the painting is its Renaissance elegance and a romantic mood derived from a slight soft focus and the subtle contrast of the various gold hues with their chromatic opposite of sky blue. Over and over Burleson returns to that burnished, glowing honey tone that seems to harken to some bygone but tantalizingly not forgotten golden age.
China Blue: Firefly Projects and Trent Burleson: Birds and Other Metaphors
Judith Tolnick Champa
Clusters of robotic fireflies variously occupy and sound in the suitably intimate, dimmed Wright Gallery at the Newport Art Museum, and just across the way, in the large well-lighted Ilgenfritz Gallery, oil paintings depict birds swooping and swooning, their berries and branches seemingly ever out of reach.
Presenting China Blue’s “Firefly Projects” installation in tandem with Trent Burleson’s “Birds and Other Metaphors” is very clever museum programming, each artist quirkily involved with their respective entomological/ornithological subject matter that in each case has historical resonance, both personal and subtly political.
Blue’s “biomimetic” project offers a new take on old-fashioned values, akin to Burleson’s in this way but spoken in a very different artistic language. Using science, she emulates nature through various strategies — substances, processes, devices or systems — notable in this installation by her handmade materials. Blue uses an amateur kit-like way of describing fireflies, or “lightning bugs” — their mating rituals, sounds and magical, elusive coloration at dusk. The media used to create one piece suggesting fireflies caught in four jars are merely “repurposed” pager motors, guitar strings, LEDs, jam jars and plastic bottles.
With her actual low-tech forms for kindling art, China Blue rekindles the conflicted childhood feelings of trapping unusual, intermittently shining, flying lights (insects). The “Firefly Projects” installation contains 2-D representations and 3-D objects, but its centerpiece is a 7 1/2-foothigh pair of fabricated “Firefly Trees” on which blue lights flicker on and off to a translated sound of flies’ mating.
Beyond nostalgia for the wonderment of seeing and catching fireflies, Blue’s understated political message has to do with ecosystem disruption, with the loss of these insects from contemporary life due to our society’s invasive pollution from artificial light.
For his part, Trent Burleson also gets lost productively — and we viewers are brought closely along — in his staunch love of Renaissance painting, especially his fascination with “disegno” and “chiaroscuro.” His skillful figural images, surprising if not peculiar in their shape harmonies played out in oil on canvas against warm, if frequently tonguein- cheek, exaggerated “old master” tonalities, always richly convey the availability of classicism’s precedent.
Artscope, New England's Culture Magazine, July 2011
FLIPPING THE BIRD
‘Three Warblers — Caterpillar’ |
‘Diving Warbler with Insect’ |
‘Red Bird Diving’ |
Painter Trent Burleson takes an alternative approach to ornithological scenes, separating birds from their surroundings
‘Birds and Other Metaphors’
Trent Burleson
May 21 through Aug. 17
Newport Art Museum, 76 Bellevue Ave., Newport
(401) 848-8200
www.newportartmuseum.org
BY DANIEL COMBS/MERCURY
Perfect beauty, it seems, is always just out of reach.
Trent Burleson, shown at his Rumford home, takes a surreal, often darkly comic, approach to portraying birds, landscapes, people and still life. Photo by Meredith Brower) |
When it comes time to be a critic, most of us find that pointing out blemishes, imperfections and faults tends to be a sanctimoniously easy task. While it’s a mistake to say that nothing in this world is beautiful (there are certainly a great many beautiful things), it is less of a stretch to suggest that not many of us have stumbled upon a scene of pure, flawless beauty.
Which is why a formal composition of objects arranged in harmonious balance has a certain power to it. The canvas within the rectangle is a world unto itself. Instead of merely representing, this is a world with the power of creation. When Trent Burleson paints, he is the creator of his own ideal world, now on display at the Newport Art Museum in his solo exhibition, “Birds and Other Metaphors.”
Burleson, 58, a professor of painting and drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design, paints beguilingly flawless (semi-) real subjects. His large canvases depict landscapes, still lives, portraits and a series of birds; all are tinged with a sense of the surreal, often to dark, comedic effect.
He will remove objects from landscapes to make the image nicer. He will alter the proportion of his subjects to build a harmony with the surrounding elements. Painters do this all the time. Paint is not a photograph; it isn’t bound to pure documentation. But Burleson alters the world within his painting with a certain sort of reverence.
“I’d create, I guess, an ideal world, the world as I wish it was,” he recalls with an element of profound inevitability, “because that seemed to have some point to it.”
Burleson’s fixation with this ubiquitous quality of unblemished beauty comes from a fascination with the great painters of the Renaissance period. He spits out their names one after another — Caravaggio, Leonardo, Raphael, Botticelli — never going longer than 10 minutes in a conversation about his work without recalling another timeless master.
“I was thinking of assignments for my students,” he recalls, explaining how he came to emulate the Renaissance maestros with his “Madonna and Child” series. “And the assignment might be: Look at the Renaissance painters; look at their conception of beauty. And, of course, if you paint the Madonna, she should be an ideal kind of beauty. So as a sort of a challenge, I thought, ‘Well, what if I could try to paint a painting as if I was a Renaissance artist’ … come up with an original painting, but paint it as if it was the time.”
The result is a saturated take on the classic image. An oblique sense of gloom, not overpowering, seems to seep out of the paint. Burleson’s Madonna resonates with a sad, still sense of beauty that toys with the notion of “classical.” The image recalls a familiar composition but lingers on new and complicated emotions. There is a self-consciousness to the picture — it knows it’s a ruse and has fun wishing.
This self-awareness permeates many of Burleson’s paintings, and in his Bird series, for which he is perhaps best known, this awareness reaches an emotional apex. “They don’t really look very much like real birds that you’d see in a bird book,” he is quick to point out.
There is a striking sense of dark surrealism here. This is a group of scowling, screeching, maleficent winged creatures almost superimposed onto a muted landscape of dark boughs and shadowed leaves. They fight for berries and dive toward their prey, but it is not their actions that mark their presence so much as their illusive quality within the composition. The birds seem apart from their surroundings; they are highlighted somehow beyond the traditional category of the subject to take on a new level of eclipsing importance.
“Many people paint birds … their birds might be about how pretty their feathers are, and how cute it is when they chirp … my birds are not about that.”
The titillating, playfully evil birds are Burleson’s most evocative work, weighted with attitude in a way that his idealistic portraits and landscapes can’t compete with. “I think it’s my personality; it’s just who I am,” he explains. “They’re my conception of birds and they have some naiveté to them.”
Here within the somber dream world Burleson’s art seems most at home. These naive birds spring from a creative mind that can’t not reshape the world into a more ideal place. His world is on display until Aug. 17.
A Members’ Reception for summer 2011 exhibits, including “Trent Burleson: Birds and Other Metaphors,” “China Blue: Firefly Projects,” “Remembering the Ladies: Women and The Art Association of Newport,” and “Things with Wings,” is Friday, June 10, from 5-7 p.m. at the Newport Art Museum. Free for members; $10 suggested donation for nonmembers.
I’m no art critic, but there’s something wonderfully Magritteish about a few of the canvases in Trent Burleson: Birds and Other Metaphors — the tone of the feathers, the atmosphere of the sky, that blend of real/surreal. In the course of his career, the RISD prof has moved from landscapes to still lives to a celebration of the Old Masters. But the action of flight led him to this ornithological turn: “I love these paintings because of the narrative the birds create; they’re flying, they’re going somewhere.” He likes the dabs of exaggeration that mark his canvases: “If I was a naturalist, I would make the birds more realistic; paint them with a higher degree of verisimilitude.” That arty aura is key to Burleson’s work, which is at the Newport Art Museum, 76 Bellevue Avenue, through August 17 | 401.848.8200
The Boston Phoenix, May 20011
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A second madonna and child painting, oil on canvass, 39" by 33.5",photographed January 7, 2011.
The first Madonna painting, Madonna and Child, 39.5" by 36.75", oil on canvass. July, 2010
The House Box
July 2, 2009.
For the first time the Burleson House Boxes are for sell on this site.
Go to The House Box
A recent painting "Two Birds Espy" will be on exhibit at the Rhode Island School
of Design Museum of Art from February 19 to March 15, 2009. The opening for
the Faculty Biennial is Thursday, February 19, from 6-8 pm.
TEES TIME
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 by Elizabeth LeuthnerFrom "Our (and your) RISD"
RISD’s Chace Center is the place to be this Thursday, November 6, 2008, 7-9pm, when RISD and Threadless unveil the online tee shirt company’s first guest-curated Threadless Select Series, with the theme and artists chosen by RISD President John Maeda. After an open call for submissions and a request for suggestions by RISD alumni and students, the president assembled four professors as creatives for the project: Nancy Skolos from Graphic Design, Soojung Ham [RISD ‘92, Industrial Design] from Industrial Design, and Trent Burleson [RISD MFA ‘76, Painting] and Randy Willier, both from Illustration. All the faculty members have given a unique meaning to John Maeda’s chosen theme ofNewness. Beginning with the RISD series, Threadless now plans to have guest curators for the Select Series on an ongoing basis. The RISD Newness shirts can be purchased online at theselectseries.com or in-store at risd|works. Sales proceeds, coupled with the artists’ and president’s generation donation of their commissions, will amount to an impressive $15,000 donation to our scholarship fund.
From Unbeige THURSDAY, NOV 06 John Maeda and RISD Staffers Team Up with Threadless Select
Proof that taking over at the Rhode Island School of Design hasn't changed his ways, John Maeda has stayed true to his cooler than cool roots and has just teamed up with Threadless, being the first guest-curator for their Select Series t-shirts. Maeda came up with a concept to base the designs off of, newness, and then chose the artists to put their pens to fabric to come up with something. The shirts were just unveiled last night at the RISD's Chace Center building and we were fortunate to get an early sneek peek before they're officially launched on Threadless' site on Monday the 10th. Here's a bit, with images of the shirts after the jump: After an open call for submissions and a request for suggestions by RISD alumni and students via his blog, Maeda assembled four professors as creatives for the project. Nancy Skolos from Graphic Design, Soojung Ham from Industrial Design, and Trent Burlesonand Randy Willier, both from Illustration -- all incredible practitioners in their respective professional fields -- agreed to join on as artists and designers in giving a unique meaning to Maeda's chosen theme of newness. Images after the jump: Trent Burleson, Illustration professor |
