Week Nine
STEVE BURNHAM
An on-line drawing exhibition
April through June
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Portrait Society Gallery is pleased to present PSG on PAPER, an exhibition about drawing. Each week, the gallery presents the work of one artist.
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All of the work can be purchased on the website's Store (above in menu). We will porch deliver anywhere in the MIlwaukee area free of charge.
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Artists include: Emily Belknap, Melissa Cooke, Steve Burnham, Skully Gustafson (Week One), Pat Hidson (Week Three), Nykoli Koslow (Week Two), Ashley Lusietto (Week Five), David Niec, Rosemary Ollison (Week Seven), Amy O'Neill (Week Eight), Mark Ottens, Nirmal Raja, Rafael Francisco Salas (Week Six), Della Wells, M Winston (Week Four), Christopher T. Wood.
Steve Burnham, studio, 2019.
Steve Burnham, When We Wept at Summer’s Abundance, 2020
Ink, colored pencil, watercolor, gouache, spray paint on watercolor paper 20 x 15 inches. $400
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WEEK NINE: STEVE BURNHAM
Steve Burnham's drawings swap one universe for another. The abrupt shifts into places of thin air, cosmic beams of light, cells and bubbles, patterns of almost recognizable paint handling from another place or time or artist that you can't quite name, dizzying inversions of metaphor where the messy and haphazard almost ooze out of control but then manage to behave.
Burnham is a "Wise/Guy," deftly stitching patches of image and idea into these gregarious, elegantly renegade, beautiful compositions.
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BIO
Steve Burnham makes paintings and drawings that are filtered through his interests in art history, language and materials. He earned an MFA in painting from the University of Kansas and an MA in English from UW-Madison. He has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and at the Portrait Society Gallery, Green Gallery, Milwaukee Art Museum, Charles Allis Art Museum, Museum of Wisconsin Art, Inova, and Haggerty Museum of Art. Four of his recent drawings were acquired by St. Kate: The Arts Hotel.
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ARTIST STATEMENT
STEVE BURNHAM: "The cold makes me draw. Or rather, warmth allows it—the warmth from a space heater tucked under my desk during my early morning studio hours from December into March, when it is too cold to paint. This winter’s drawing ran parallel to the early news of a deadly virus in China, through its arrival (and presidential denial) in the US, and into the beginning of safer-at-home measures. I never lost access to my studio—as many artists did—and I stayed healthy (and remain so, knock on wood!). But COVID-19—or at least its shadow—seems present in all the work I made for this exhibition."