Richmond Burton

When artist Richmond Burton ’82 begins to feel a little sluggish in his studio, he takes what most of us would consider drastic measures to reinvigorate himself. Instead of simply napping or making himself some coffee, Burton runs the mile and a half from his East Hampton, Long Island, home to the waters of Northwest Harbor, jumps into the often bracingly cold water, and runs all the way back, dripping wet. Incredibly, he maintains this regimen even in the dead of winter.

This plucky, adventurous spirit characterizes Burton’s attitude toward life and toward art. “If you get that feeling of excitement,” he explains, “then you’re on the right track, because you’re creating excitement for yourself, and that means that in your own terms, it’s a radical move. If I’m thinking of several different choices, I ask myself, ‘What is the most radical thing that I can do?’ and that’s the one I’ll go with.”

Burton’s determination and his willingness to take risks seem to be working. By any measure in the intense competition of the international art world, he has emerged as an unquestioned success. Burton has had solo exhibitions throughout the United States and in Brussels, London, Turin, and Zurich. His paintings and drawings hang in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His work has been featured on numerous occasions in such prestigious publications as the New York Times, the New Yorker, ArtForum, and Art in America.

Despite all of this attention, Burton claims, “I have no idea what most people think, I just don’t. One of the things about being here in my splendid semi-isolation is that I don’t really get that much feedback, I’ve just really gone very deep into myself.” He spends most days quietly thinking and working in the spectacular, light-filled environs of the studio in his home, which once belonged to renowned painter Elaine de Kooning. The unspoiled surroundings of East Hampton have afforded Burton the opportunity of “tapping into the American existential tradition of Thoreau.” Burton takes inspiration from his many walks, often accompanied by his dog, Jeff, in the forest and on the gravel beach near his house. “That’s my cathedral,” Burton says of nature, “and it never falls short.”

Burton’s sensitivity to the natural world pervades both his approach to painting and the paintings themselves. He likens his paintings to living beings, with his creative vision as the organs and the canvas and stretcher as skin and bones. “They have a life of their own, and I just allow it,” he explains. While most of Burton’s paintings are abstract, they are populated by graceful biomorphic forms that seem like something nature itself might have devised if given a brush and canvas. Often painted in exuberant harmonies of color, the shapes in Burton’s paintings evoke forms as disparate as teardrops, pods, sperm, eggs, cells, and half moons. The paintings’ dazzling play of color and form creates the impression of light streaming through a leafy mesh of branches or dancing on the shimmering surface of a lake at dawn.

“Richmond has an incredibly light spirit,” comments Will Ryan, a photographer and friend of Burton, “and his work has this incredibly light spirit which sometimes is quite difficult to capture in a painting. We generally perceive painting as having some heavy weight, which usually is dark. Not everybody can give up that darkness and head for the light and still make a really deep painting.” Such is Burton’s sunny, benevolent disposition that even his voice-mail greetings have been known to consist of bright declarations—“Today is a beautiful day, even though I have a cold,” for example—voiced with no detectable irony. Laura Peters, a collector of Burton’s work who has also become his friend, describes Burton as a “divinely inspired” artist with “a very generous spirit . . . that expresses itself in his canvases.”

Above: Thought Bubbles (84 x 168 inches) Image courtesy of Cheim & Read

In a contemporary art world that has sometimes treated beauty as a kind of taboo, Burton unapologetically persists in making paintings that are voluptuously gorgeous. “I would say that Burton’s work is very sensuous and joyful,” observes John Cheim of Cheim & Read, the blue-chip Chelsea gallery that represents Burton’s work. “He’s not being ironic. He aspires to beauty and believes that is a genuine and valid pursuit.” Burton elaborates, “I think really my job is almost to expand an idea of beauty, because sometimes the paintings seem really ugly also, and the line between beauty and ugliness can be really thin. So I like to explore that line, to walk that tightrope.” Burton’s work takes on conventional dividing lines in both its imagery and its inspirations. “Something I find really challenging, fascinating, and motivating is the idea of breaking down boundaries,” he enthuses. “Tribally, sexually, materially, dimensionally, and between abstraction and figuration. Those are the places that I find really juicy.”

Burton has been challenging preconceptions and forging his own path ever since his childhood in a small town, where his desire to become an artist was sometimes discouraged as impractical by his parents and teachers. Born in Talladega, Alabama, in 1960, Burton credits his artistic grandmother with awakening his creative energies. He sought out exposure to contemporary art wherever he could. For instance, he recalls driving to Birmingham in a rare snowstorm with his learner’s permit and his father in tow to attend a lecture by sculptor George Segal.

Motivated by his parents’ warnings about the difficulties of making it as an artist, Burton devoted his college education to the study of architecture. He spent two years in the architecture program at Auburn University before transferring to Rice in 1980.

Burton made the most of his time at Rice and in Houston. He recalls his studio art, art history, and architecture classes with Karin Broker, Bill Camfield, Gordon Wittenberg, Peter Papadimitrious, Bas Poulos, and visiting professor Michael Wilford as especially formative. Broker, who invited Burton back to Rice in 1999 to lead a master printmaking workshop, recalls Burton in his student days as “an amazing draftsman” who was “so wonderful to teach.”

As a transfer student, Burton lived on campus at Lovett College for only one semester and tended to spend more of his time at Will Rice with a group of “artsy” friends. Among the former members of this “little Saint Elmo’s Fire-style clique” are well-known installation artist Michael Petry ’81 and fashion designer Jim Mischka ’85 of the international sensation Badgley Mischka. In an odd coincidence, the February 2000 issue of Vogue features a photograph of art collector Yvonne Force in her home, modeling a slinky Badgley Mischka gown in front of a matching Burton painting, Itchy Landscape.

Above: I Am (Lucifer) (4 x 9 feet) Images courtesy of Cheim & Read

Burton became involved with what was then the Rice Museum, an exhibition space initiated by consummate arts patron Dominique de Menil in what is now the Rice Media Center. As a volunteer assistant, Burton helped unpack and hang the paintings for the 1982 Yves Klein retrospective at the museum. “That was really huge for a kid who grew up in Alabama and was totally salivating over the reproductions in the book. To actually have that level of familiarity with the paintings and see people hang them and go through the whole process . . . it was so amazing and a really big thing for me, and I’m very thankful to have had that experience.” Another highlight of his Rice experience was his participation in an archaeological dig outside of Rome in a 1983 summer course taught by Walter Widrig and Philip Oliver-Smith.

Though Burton professes to have always known he wanted to be an artist, he greatly values his architectural training at Rice. “The program at Rice is a great program, and they really seem to stress process. It’s something the art schools don’t teach enough, in my opinion. I think if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing, because my primary education was architectural and then I was studying art also. I really think my studio architecture classes taught me a lot about creativity.”

For his preceptorship in the 1982–83 academic year, Burton traveled to Philadelphia to work for Mitchell/Giurgola Architects, a firm that was at the time best known for designing the Australian Houses of Parliament. He worked on the design of a newly expanded factory for Knoll International, an upscale furniture manufacturer. “It was fascinating,” Burton says. “I got to go to the factory and see all these things being made, the architectural influence of how things are made, how they go together.”

After returning to Rice and receiving his bachelor of architecture degree in 1984, Burton moved to New York to work for I.M. Pei & Partners. Just as he had in Houston, Burton took full advantage of everything New York had to offer. “I went to all the museums. I went to galleries, I went to concerts, I did standing-room at the opera constantly, and the ballet. I became friends with people who were famous, whom I grew up reading about. Imagine—it was fantastic!”

At I.M. Pei & Partners, Burton worked on the design of the glass pyramids in front of the Louvre in Paris, a coveted assignment in the firm because it was one of only a few projects in which Pei himself was directly involved. When asked how he became involved in this project, Burton replied, with characteristic candor, “The way I’ve gotten everything: I just asked if I could do it. Really. I had the chutzpah or the naïveté or the nerve or whatever just to say, ‘Hey, what about me?’”

Burton attempted to pursue his own interests in painting throughout his two-year tenure at I.M. Pei. “I was making black paintings, and it was all very monk-like. I would go home from my architecture job and I would paint, and I stopped going out.” Eventually, it became clear to Burton that architecture “wasn’t a creative enough venture for me in terms of what I was looking for artistically, and that I still had this need to be involved with the direct creativity of putting paint down on a surface.” Burton left I.M. Pei & Partners to pursue his career as an artist and “never, never looked back.” He landed his first solo show in 1987 at Postmasters, a hip East Village gallery (that has since moved to Chelsea), just a year after leaving his architecture job to pursue a career in art full time—a feat many up-and-coming artists can only dream of.

Burton has been blazing his own unique creative trail and exhilarating viewers ever since. He views his deep inward focus as having an important outward effect. “The more I become more of an individual,” Burton says, “the more I can be an example to others to do the same.” His paramount goal in sharing his innermost self on canvas is to prompt viewers to “come away with a feeling of individuality in themselves.”

Burton’s most recent series of works, the I AM paintings from 2000 to the present, stress his own individuality and self-realization. Contained in the title of all of his recent works, the words “I am” are for Burton “emblematic of giving yourself the ultimate permission and putting yourself in charge of your life as a creative project—the ability to manifest it, to manifest your dreams.” Emblazoned on the paint-splattered, goldenrod shirt that Burton wears for painting are the words “I am undeniable.”

The I AM paintings display Burton an artist who has now more than ever hit his stride. In Burton’s previous works, his lyrical flourishes were structured by an invisible grid—a remnant of his training in architecture and an indication of his fascination with repeating cellular structures. The I AM paintings de-emphasize and in some cases completely dispense with this grid, allowing Burton the freedom to more fully unleash his talent for lavish, fluid expressiveness. The relaxation of the formal elements in Burton’s paintings has been the upshot of a process of personal development and self-exploration that accelerated in 1998, when Burton moved from Manhattan and its heady whirl of activity to the relative solitude and quiet of East Hampton.

The masterful I AM (Slice of Moment) from 2001 exemplifies several of the exciting directions that Burton’s recent work has taken. Delicate swirls and rivulets of copper and silver paint emanate a luxuriant sheen against a richly textured neutral ground. Punctuated with flecks of warm vermilion, these elegant, calligraphic curves create a feather-light filigree that seems as if it is in constant motion. Two large bulbous forms hover in this fragile net like motes drifting across a retina. A series of small, sail-like triangles that arc across the top of the painting signal an indistinct horizon line. In I AM (Slice of Moment), the grid of years past has yielded to an ever-developing felicity of gesture and the increasingly bold insertion of large abstract forms.

The titles of Burton’s paintings—Sapphire Skin, Space Kitchen, The Warmth of the Sun, and I AM (Confucius Upside Down Cake), to name a few—have always reflected both his irreverent sense of humor and his poetic sensibility. In the case of I AM (Slice of Moment), the title also embodies Burton’s deeply held personal philosophy of living life to its fullest. Whether daring new innovations in painting, submerging himself in icy-cold water, or trying his hand at his latest hobby, snowboarding, Burton pursues a vast spectrum of interests with prodigious energy and commitment.

Burton’s rules for living are anything but abstract: “Rebel and question every step of the way. That’s what I did. It works. And don’t let them say no. Do it your own way and define your own terms. I’ve always lived by that credo.” As one of the rare individuals who has managed to mobilize his most animating and abiding passion into a professional life that not only sustains, but stimulates, Burton’s story carries a message that he doesn’t hesitate to voice. “I’m living proof, and I’m the first one to say it: you can live off of doing what you love. It hasn’t always been easy, but it’s always been possible, and I’ve never lost sight of that.”

—By Maria Stalford
—Photos By Will Ryan