ARTIST STATEMENT
Louis B. Burroughs, January 2010
My art arises from experiences, current events, and observations. It is a make believe endeavor directed toward engaging the mysteries of the psyche together with aspects of the natural world and its drama. It is an intricate yet simple interplay between the craft, the humanities, and the elegance of the sciences. Simultaneously, it is organic and spontaneous forces working both in unison and in opposition. When it is successful the work speaks of itself, and for itself.
I do not have a fixed all encompassing theoretical framework for organizing and making paintings. I have spent more time browsing the Internet and experimenting in my studio working out issues of form and content, than in classrooms. I have receive a great deal assistance from art publications gathered in my travels and books generously donated by other artists who thought the information would be helpful to my work. I am inspired by those of my contemporaries who have dedicated their lives to mastering the craft in the daunting and potentially unrewarding proposition of making art.
When a painting is started it is equipoised between the ideas I have become fascinated with, research, and the demands of the craft. The initial physical stage of the painting starts with newspaper clippings, charcoal stick figure sketches on a canvass. After which begins a process of edits of the drawing and an endless search for a color scheme that will project the subject matter forward from the canvass into the psyches of the viewer. In this series of paintings, color is added to the drawing in thin layers of gesso, linseed oil, oil sticks and oil paint.
The paintings in this show correspond to the most recent lynching in our country, corporate sponsored sports and the invasion of Iraq. The painting “American General”, is about the selling of a rational for the invasion of Iraq and the debacle of Abu Garib. Grant Woods 1930 iconic painting “American Gothic” and its aphorisms is the inspirational basis of “American General.” The painting is embossed with found electronics and wire to project the hi-tech, inhuman and brutal nature of the Iraqi war.
“Lynched Life” is about the lynching of Emmett Till, and Robert Byrd and the bombing at the 16th street Baptist Church in Birmingham. It is an amalgamation of the made up landscapes of Money Mississippi, Birmingham Alabama and Jasper Texas. Who were the painters making art about the brutal nature of the Klan long before the U.S. Justice system intervened in these matters? I have borrowed freely from them: Phillip Guston, early Jackson Pollock and Robert Colescott who used the realities and irony of oppression in their art. It is also informed by the Kent state tragedy of 1970, which altered the way in which I thought about the nature of politics, race and violence in this country.
“Net Slaves” is about the education, sponsorship, ownership of athletes and the products and rewards of their labor. The fusing of the painting into a cohesive image came with the recruitment and selling of a local high school athletic phenomena and the improbable expectation that his prowess would resurrect a city in search of a purpose for existence. The eighteenth century painter and neoclassicists Jacques Louis David 1799 “Rape of the Sabine Women” is the pictorial basis for ‘Net Slaves.
The need to create is more than individual fulfillment or the freedom of self expression through drawing and painting. it is a burning desire to reawaken the life force and hope of oppressed people and further advance an affirmation of their creative histories, whether their artistic genealogy are rooted in Egypt, Africa, the Americas, or Europe. Each work fails if it cannot be heard as a clarion call for the viewer to liberate themselves and all people from social, cultural, political, and intellectual bondage.
Lynched Life
Oil on Canvas