Steve Burnham nurtures a daily painting practice that seeks to synthesize various forms of representation (still life, landscape, portraiture, abstraction) as a way to understand the world. His paintings embrace the energies of our time: They are tumultuous, ahistorical, funny, and resistant to a gestalt. They are also love letters to painting itself, foregrounding their making, their construction, and referencing, as a kind of language, a wide range of art history.

 

Burnham earned his BA and MA in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, followed by a BFA in painting and drawing from UW-Milwaukee and an MFA from the University of Kansas. Both fields of study, literature and fine arts, inform his work with words, puns, and wordplay integral to the interplay of image and title.

 

Burnham has been included in numerous one and two-person exhibitions including Unlike My Image at Portrait Society Gallery; Shared Terrain at Edgewood College, Madison; Inclement Circumstances at Carroll College; Alverno College; The Real Tinsel; the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. He was awarded a Mary L. Nohl Fellowship in 2004.