Kathleen Burke

The Artist

Kathleen Burke was born in Pennsylvania and began painting in her early teens. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Seton Hill University in 1991 and a Master of Fine Arts from Winthrop University in 2007. Kathleen has been working in encaustic since 2004.

Artist’s Statement

The inspiration for my work – both representational and abstract – is landscape. I explore psychological and existential questions and how these are present in complex relationships - between individuals and between humanity and nature. The use of landscape as a metaphorical vehicle takes the work beyond the personal and out into the world of the viewer, both figuratively and literally. The differing points of view and distance from the subject can be read as indicators of various emotional states. They include aspects of memory filtered through love, grief, regret, desire and the awareness of the passage of time. The physicality of the encaustic surface and/or the use of incorporated text are factors that break the illusion and make the paintings function as something other than a purely visual expression of a particular place.

I began exploring encaustic painting after nearly 20 years of painting in oils and acrylics. Encaustics demand a surface-oriented approach, and I found that the marriage of the landscape images and the emphatic surface qualities of the encaustic mesh wonderfully. The range and rapidity with which texture can be achieved is astonishing and seductive. The wax can be scraped smooth and burnished to the sheen of highly polished marble, pulled roughly in broken layers to resemble fresco, or built up quickly into the thickest sculptural impasto. It also accepts and integrates oil pastel and some brands of dry pastel very well, which allows for the incorporation of gestural drawing within the work.