LET'S GET TO KNOW ARTISTS

LUKE ANDERSON & RICHARD BURKE

Richard Burke  "Defiant"  |  Limestone  13 x 5 x 5.5"

Luke Anderson  "Zig Zag Clouds"  |  Acrylic and Oil on Canvas  24 x 30"

Richard Burke  "Sentinel"  |  Limestone  11 x 4 x 4"

Luke Anderson  "Desert Dust"  |  Acrylic and Oil on Canvas  18 x 24"

Q:  How has your approach to your work shifted over the course of your career?

Richard:  I carved my first sculptures in the late 90’s; these wood duck decoys were vital in learning how to subtract material in order to create a form. During the early 2000’s I branched out into bronze and my interest in sculpting birds of prey began to grow. In 2016 I bought a piece of soapstone to sculpt a small owl. This was my first effort at working in stone. As my ability grew in sculpture, I began to look for ways to loosen up my style. I also wanted to utilize natural materials and incorporate them into the finished piece in a way that was original. This current work uses fractured edges, cracks and anomalies in the stone to add interest to each piece. 

Luke: I think my work has become less formulaic and more opportunistic. I used to work in a pretty rigid and strict way, starting from a really detailed drawing with hardly any significant changes to the composition or colors throughout the process. Now I work a lot more opportunistically, in a more deductive process that allows me to work in a more organic way, much more in conversation with the piece as I'm working on it, making sweeping changes over the course of the process and taking what the painting is giving me. It leads to a lot more interesting and spontaneous and unexpected results than when I stick too rigidly to one possibility from the very beginning.

Richard Burke  "Dappled"  |  Limestone  15.5 x 7 x 6"

Luke Anderson  "Clouds from Below"  |  Acrylic and Oil on Canvas 24 x 36"

Q:  Is there a specific piece from “Of Sand and Stone” that’s your favorite and why? 

Richard:  The Mexican Spotted Owl in Limestone, “Dappled” is one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever sculpted. The white layer on the outside of the stone is efflorescence. It is dissolved lime salts from inside the stone which migrated to the exterior of the stone during evaporation. When the water evaporates it leaves a mineral film which becomes stone over time. I left the efflorescence in places to represent white spots on the owl’s breast. The sleepy face of this owl communicates a safe and satisfied attitude which makes me happy. This species is native to New Mexico and the other Four Corners states of the southwest.

Luke:  Probably either Amargosa Sunset or Clouds From Below. I have done a few paintings featuring power lines recently and I have really been enjoying them. They serve as really functional design/compositional tools to provide a nice balance between vertical and horizontal elements and create a connection point between ground and sky. I also really like the juxtaposition between the natural beauty of the landscape and sky against the human element of the poles and wires. In Clouds From Below, I enjoyed the simplicity as well as the challenge of cloudscape compositions that didn't have a horizon or landscape in it for a point of reference. I wanted to create a mostly abstract painting based on the repetition of patterns and contrasts of values from nature, using the dark blue of the sky as the darkest value for depth, and the yellow-whites of the cloud as the lightest value for brightness. With the pinkish-grey shaded bottoms of the clouds, it creates a really nice three-color scheme that's just really pleasing and minimal. I feel like it's a concept with a lot of potential and I'm just scratching the surface.

Richard Burke  "Indifferent"  |  Sandstone  20 x 9 x 6"

Luke Anderson  "Sandstone Abstraction"  |  Acrylic and Oil on Canvas  16 x 20"

Q:  How do your materials inform your subjects, or alternately, how do your subjects help you select your materials?

Richard:  When searching for stone, I usually have the size and basic shape of certain birds in mind. I prefer a restful pose to an active one. If the stone is wide at the top, it will probably become an owl. If the top of the stone tapers, I will begin to try to find a hawk or falcon in the material. I work hard to find a characteristic posture or gesture of each species.

Richard Burke  "Persistent"  |  Limestone  8.5 x 5 x 3.5"

Luke Anderson  "Morning Light Near Zion"  |  Acrylic and Oil on Canvas  24 x 36"

Q:  As an emerging artist, what role does experimentation and play have in your work? 

Luke:  Everything. My favorite historical artists are the ones whose art continually evolved over their careers, even if they were only really known for one particular period of their work. Experimentation and play are the best ways to learn new things and make unexpected discoveries, and that's what keeps the work fresh, exciting, and unique. It's the best way to dig into your own voice, and to avoid complacency and burnout.

Richard Burke  "Reticent"  |  Limestone  18 x 8 x 4.5"

Luke Anderson  "Entering Moab"  |  Mixed Media on Canvas  20 x 20"

Q: How do you strike the balance between providing enough detail to convey your ideas, and knowing at what point to stop working on a particular piece? 

Richard: In order to properly represent certain kinds of birds I seek stones of approximate size and basic shape of that species. Though birds are typically round shapes, I prefer square angular forms. To visually communicate “birdness” I work to get the facial details as perfect as possible. The angle of the eyes and how they relate to the beak are critical. When sculpting owls in particular, I often manipulate the facial features to capture human-like expressions which are not necessarily reflective of a natural expression for a real bird. When the sculpture arrives at a pleasing pose and presence, I stop. Exact representation is not my goal.  

Luke: Overworking is one of the cardinal sins of painting. Unfortunately, sometimes you don't really know where that line is until you've already crossed it. It's one of the reasons I switched from oil to acrylic as my primary medium a few years ago. Acrylic was a lot more forgiving and easier to make those mistakes more freely with easier opportunities to go back to a previous step (acrylics dry quicker so mistakes can be addressed immediately, and they're a little bit less particular from a chemical perspective when it comes to layering/covering up mistakes). That's kind of why I like the deductive method of painting - if you start with the big, most important shapes and values and gradually get smaller and more detailed as you work, it's a little bit easier to naturally fall into what feels comfortable in terms of detail, as opposed to drawing out every tiny detail at the very beginning and then feeling obligated to include them because you took the time to painstakingly draw them out.

Richard Burke  "Elusive"  |  Limestone  14 x 5.5 x 6.5"

Luke Anderson  "Amargosa Sunset"  |  Acrylic and Oil on Panel  18 x 24"

Q:  Are you excited about any new techniques in your recent work? What sparked that inspiration? 

Richard: Incorporating varieties in value is risky in 3-dimensional work. Limestone naturally has darker and lighter veins, so one eye will usually appear darker than the other. I was using wire brushes to polish a piece and noticed some of the metal transfers onto the stone. If one brushes white vinegar onto the limestone, it will chemically react to the limestone and etch the steel or brass metal into the surface of the stone. Now the darker value is permanent. I now use this technique to some degree on every piece.  

Luke:  As my work has gotten more simplified, minimal, geometric and abstracted, with flatter and more uniform fields of color, I have tried to explore ways I can incorporate subtle variation in color and surface texture within those color fields so that they are dynamic when viewed from different distances and angles. I did a lot of new things with underpaintings in these pieces, both with color and texture, that got me really excited for my work going forward. I tried to use my underpainting hues more strategically to interact with and enhance the colors layered above, using more broken brushstrokes to keep the layers underneath visible for some optical mixing effects. I did the same thing with textures, using additives to the paint underneath for thicker base textures, or in some cases even using a paper collage as a base surface to create very unexpected, nontraditional surface textures. I love the idea of a work that is as engaging when viewed far away as it is up close, and I think I pushed a little bit closer to that with some of these works. 

Richard Burke  "Solitary"  |  Limestone  11 x 4 x 4"

Luke Anderson  "Pink Cliffs"  |  Acrylic and Oil on Canvas  24 x 30"

Q: What do you consider to be signature concepts or questions that have been present in your work throughout your life as an artist? 

Richard:  The ancient nature of stone has always fascinated me. Deep textures, fractures and moss or lichen covered surfaces speak to me. The standing stones of northern Europe, cave paintings in Germany and France and North American pictographs and petroglyphs greatly inspire me as they convey human presence and communication of culture over thousands of years. Birds. When I was five years old, I was playing at my grandparents’ small farm. I looked in a rabbit hutch and was surprised to find three little American Kestrels staring back at me. They were so tiny and fluffy and perfect. The only way I could process the experience was to draw them over and over again; It was like, if I could draw them, the experience must have been real.  

Luke:  I think I've always been kind of interested in the concept of efficiency and pragmatism in my painting, trying to find the fewest number of colors and values, and the simplest shapes in order to convey an idea. The human eye is really fascinating and powerful and adept at filling in information where there are gaps, and I am really interested in how I can use that to my advantage in my paintings and put those biological qualities of the eye to work.

Richard Burke  "Tercel"  |  Limestone  16 x 5.5 x 5"

Luke Anderson  "Rabbitbrush and Arch"  |  Oil on Canvas  17 x 26"

Q:  What fills your creative cup?

Richard: I am creatively charged by spending time outdoors exploring public lands. Time alone hiking and slowly taking in the natural world is the most important thing I can do. Working with a new stone drives me to consider what form the piece would most naturally become. I get lost in the process of discovery and suddenly hours have gone by.  

Luke:  A variety of different things - being out in nature and experiencing the awe of the landscape or the sky, but even just watching a great TV show or movie, experiencing a really moving live musical performance, reading a classic book, or even listening to a captivating podcast with fantastic storytelling can get the gears of inspiration and motivation moving.

Richard Burke  "Winsome"  |  Limestone  11 x 5 x 5"

Luke Anderson  "Western Skies"  |  Acrylic and Oil on Canvas  30 x 24"

Q:   If you had to describe each other's work in 3 words, what would they be?

Richard: Luke’s work is spacious, tonal and quiet.

Luke:  Monolithic, Timeless, Organic.

To check out Richard Burke and Luke Anderson's show Of Sand and Stone online, visit the show page on our website here. 

If you're local to Santa Fe or in town visiting our beautiful city, we'd love to see you at our opening reception on Friday, March 21st, from 5 - 7:00pm. Located at 203 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM  87501.