Lynn Burnes Art

Artist's Statement

Several years ago and quite by accident I painted a series of arcs that seemed to represent something.  These shapes and forms continued to emerge as elemental forces in my compositions. To me, they appeared to be doors, openings, caves, portals, gaps, holes, and maybe even vortexes. 

I believe that our minds work as complex data and image processors, with our eyes taking in all that is around us on a daily basis.   Our eyes send these images to the brain which stores them for a length of time, depending on their importance to us.  (And, as we know, some images can never be erased from the mind.)  I think the images we allow into our minds may come out later in another form, and for some of us, in art, perhaps in a sort of alchemy.

We are all part of a universe that is more enormous than anything we can comprehend.  Many of us have asked ourselves at one time or another, “What is our place in the universe?  Why are we here?”

In pondering these questions and themes about the universe, I came to realize that my fascination with the cosmos and with the geometry of nature emerges in my art.  I love viewing photos taken by the Hubble telescope—faraway galaxies, countless stars, expanding solar systems, multi-colored nebulae,  immense planets, and pitted moons. These images capture my imagination.  And my art then sometimes becomes a subconscious attempt at reformatting these images lodged within. 

The eminent professor of mythology, Joseph Campbell, has said that “Art is a ritual that pitches you out of life on the visible plane.”  It becomes the mythologization of the environment and the universe.  Perhaps when we are open to the songs of the universe we might see the essential order of things.  Perhaps art records this act of universal creation over and over again.

 
This thought inspires me --

Every person is more than just him [or her] self, each represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.  That is why every person’s story is important, eternal, sacred….

                                                                          --Herman Hesse, Demian