Review: Charles Burwell "Paintings and Works on Paper"

Charles Burwell, an African-American painter in his mid-fifties, paints in the style of geometric abstraction. His recent show at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, on display from September 14th to October 28th , 2007, consisted of five oil paintings and five prints.

Burwell’s paintings are large and colorful, while his prints are small, black and white, and intricate. By layering psychedelic color combinations, Burwell’s paintings are elaborate and visually intense. By contrast, his digital art is constructed of black and white designs; their intensity comes from their detail and contrast of value. Both Burwell’s paintings and prints reference organic shapes and contain vertical striping. Vertical striping and energetic shapes are Burwell’s signature.

Burwell’s digital art is black and white and doesn’t command the gallery space his large colorful canvases do. They were created in a virtual way but take up real space, as do his paintings. Although the digital art images are intricate and intimate, they lack variation of surface and the hand-painted quality which makes his paintings so extraordinary. Burwell’s digital work is elaborately patterned, yet sterile.

In contrast, Burwell’s paintings are lively. Most of his paintings displayed at the DCCA are untitled, reference cartoon shapes, and seem spontaneous in creation but methodical in process. Looking at Burwell’s paintings, one can clearly see his process and discern in what order his shapes and layers were painted. There is little attempt to disguise the hand-painted quality, despite the crisp edges of Burwell’s shapes. Because Burwell’s painted surfaces are so richly and intensely patterned with same valued colors, there is little visual depth in his work; the colors jump to the surface.

His use of patterning is more successful in some of his paintings than it is in others. The paintings that have an all-over unified pattern are overwhelming to look at, as there is no place for the eye to rest or linger. These works are often highly detailed, patterned, and intense. When looking at one of Burwell’s works containing a unified pattern, there is not much to discover; the work is quickly understood, and it is easy to pass by.

His most successful paintings are those which have moments of intensity and moments of calm. The variety of shape, color, and patterning in these paintings are the elements that hold one’s attention. His paintings that have a more varied surface and convoluted layering system is more engaging and allows the viewer to become absorbed in the nuances of his work.

Like many geometric abstract paintings, it is difficult to describe Burwell’s work without focusing on formal, and oftentimes boring, issues. By describing Burwell’s work, the visual energy of his paintings is not relayed but lost in the language of color, shape, and pattern. Perhaps Burwell’s paintings are purely decorative in their abstraction, purity of color and shape, perhaps his art is created with the sole purpose of manipulating the formal elements of painting.

Like all paintings, Charles Burwell’s structure an experience; the experience he creates is ambiguous. If the goal of Burwell’s work is to evoke memory through sensory experience, it might appeal to people who lived during the psychedelic art period of the 1960’s. The colors Burwell chooses and the intensity of surface might suggest the psychedelic art era, but not the shapes and forms; these are truly Burwell’s.

His work is impersonal, as it doesn’t directly reference any recognizable imagery. This makes his paintings hard to relate to or interpret. On the other hand, his paintings lend themselves to the pleasure of looking without being about something, and thus have universality. There is no right or wrong interpretation of Burwell’s paintings and since they are abstract they can be enjoyed equally by all despite social or political views.

These positive aspects of Burwell’s work can be appropriately attributed to any painting of pure abstraction and thus negates them as qualities that create a unique viewing experience. What makes the experience of viewing Burwell’s work differently from any other abstract geometric panting?

Burwell’s paintings do not reference or depict a particular experience, but instead create one. His paintings are bright and cheerful, and their intense orange and hot pink colors coupled with equally valued cool colors create an optical vibration. One can be amazed by Burwell’s intricately woven layers of color and stripes of paint. His paintings are joyful and energetic, and his lines are crisp, bouncy, and bold. Burwell has developed his own vocabulary of shapes that reappear in many of his works. The mark of the artist’s hand is what makes these paintings special. The formal decisions Burwell makes coupled with the energetic shapes he developed, are the elements that separate his paintings from other paintings in his field.


Charles Burwell’s work can be seen at the Bridgett Mayer Gallery or on line at: http://www.mayerartconsultants.com/artist_burwellhome.htm

Memorials for the Living

Visiting artist at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Matthew Dehaemers has structured a collaboration with the Caregiver Support Group from the Delaware chapter of Alzheimer’s Association. Dehaemers’s community based art project was sponsored by National Endowment for the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, AstraZeneca, and the JPMorgan Chase Foundation. Dehaemers is not new to community work; he has experience working for community based grant projects in Wisconsin and Kansas to create murals for schools and historical landmarks.

For this project, Dehaemers worked with four families who have spouses, parents, or grandparents with Alzheimer’s disease. In a collaboration they created three works: a conceptual video, an interactive maze, and an installation of altered cabinets and boxes. All three works concern the caregivers’ memory of their loved ones in auditory, visual and tactile ways.

The first work, a video, titled Will You Hear My Voice, depicts a composite image of both caregiver and patient. On the left side of the screen, half the caregiver’s face told stories of their ill family member before they became inflicted with the disease. Simultaneously half the Alzheimer’s patient’s face complets the screen, mute and disengaged. The video alternates seamlessly between the four sets of patients and their caregivers and their individual stories in Will You Hear My Voice. The patients’ caregivers become their sole voice and advocate. As the Alzheimer’s patients lose their ability to communicate verbally, they become defined by what their caregivers remember about them.

The mind labyrinth, titled Will You Trace My Steps, a floor piece constructed by Dehaemers addresses memory loss. It consists of interlocking foam puzzle squares in vibrant colors laid out on the floor in the shape of a large brain. The colors of the foam puzzle squares correlate with a PET scan of an Alzheimer’s patient’s brain. A winding maze is drawn on the foam tiles with indelible marker and contains writings derived from the caregiver’s experiences. Viewers are permitted to walk on the brain, without shoes, and trace the caregivers’ written memories of their loved one. By walking on a path that becomes gradually more convoluted, and reading sentences that become increasingly challenging to decipher, viewers follow the footsteps of a person with Alzheimer’s.

The third, and most moving, component to this show, titled Will You Read My Mind, consists of several altered cabinets and cigar boxes in which the caregivers reference the patients’ lives through placement of meaningful objects. The most heart wrenching objects contained in the cabinets are those that reference the loss of mobility and independence. Items, such as the patents’ car keys, eye glasses, and drivers’ licenses were isolated and made into relics for this project, showing the patients’ dependency. The cabinets and cigar boxes were arranged to allow visitors to carefully look through the personal items of the Alzheimer’s patients. Touching the objects owned by the patients brought viewers close to the reality of their life.

The altered cabinets were the most memorable and powerful works in the show, despite their creators’ lack of aesthetic training. Will You Read My Mind has the presence of true outsider art as if it could appear in Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum. Although the caregivers were guided through this project by Dehaemers, there was a true sense of self-taught artists in this work. The emotional impact of the altered cabinets is carried through to the viewer because of their reality and their tactility. It is saddening to imagine the Alzheimer’s patients’ rich lives reduced to a cabinet or container for others to look through.

The care in which Will You Read My Mind is executed and laid out reveals the importance and meaningfulness this project held for the caregivers. These memory cabinets don’t hold the Alzheimer’s patients’ memories, but the caregivers’ memories of the patient. The construction process, guided by Dehaemers, appeared to be a very cathartic exercise for the caregivers of letting go or a coming to terms with the loss of a family member’s ability to take care of or express him or herself.

Although there was excitement and joy in the exhibition, attending the reception was more like a funeral. The caregivers were very proud to show off their creations, and the viewers were eager to look through the cabinets, yet the underlying message of regression and memory loss were constant reminders of death close at hand. The cabinets were like memorials or roadside shrines not for dead people, but for people still living.

Dehaemers’s show evoked the nearness of death for these four Alzheimer’s patients and the difficulties the elderly face when approaching the end of their lives. It instills the fears of one’s own family growing old, losing memory, losing their ability to speak, and the inevitability of their death.

This body of artwork, which is community and craft based is sentimental in a way that maked all the other ‘fine’ art in the gallery seem sterile and ineffective. The cabinets, which most lacked aesthetic refinement, and were conceptually obvious, were the most poignant of all.

This show will be on display at the DCCA from September 15^th until October 3^rd.

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