I have been an artist in photography, video art & performance art, and since 1994 in printmaking showing in regional, national and international exhibits. My work of the last few years has involved the exploration of photography and printmaking as a hybrid medium of expression. The work isn't contained within a genre, although landscape and still life studies dominate, but shows concern with texture, the hand manipulation of the image and surface.Â
  For me photography is another way to create images. My Dad gave me a 35 mm camera when I was 11, as I was constantly 'borrowing' his whenever I could get my hands on it; when I was 13 I entered my first photography contest.
  Later all through Viet Nam and four years in the military I carried a camera - both as a way of interpreting what was happening to me and those around me, and to distance myself from it.
  I exhibited photography off and on until I began a career in cinematography and video in the late seventies and received a Master of Art in 1979 from the University of Missouri-KC. I taught mediated communications at Haskell Indian Nations University and later at Northern Illinois University. By 1986, bored with documentaries and commercial video production and seeking to return to the single image, I started a graduate program in studio art, while keeping my day job of producing educational programs in the arts. I found myself taking addition course-work in photography and worked with traditional printmakers in documenting their workshops and classes.
  Upon gaining my MFA, I a took a course in printmaking, and it was a zen moment in the studio: working the plates, inking, pulling prints. A wholly different tradition of the single image, a completely new toolset for me drew me. This was in 1992, and led to 18 hours of post-grad work with intaglio and relief techniques and many more hours with David Driesbach of Miracle Press who for years was the finest example of a person and an artist I'm sure I will ever know; for over a decade he invited me in to document the activities of Miracle Press and the yearly week long master printmaking sessions - his humor and technical skill shows me the way still.
  In 2002 I picked up a digital camera, mostly to record textures I found in wood, stone, mud, and textiles as references in printmaking, and I started thinking immediately about photography from the point of view of a printmaker.
  So I feel that I finally understand enough about the images that I respond to, and most importantly about the images I need to make, to take the journey as photographer and printmaker. Artistic life is full circle, I'm back to that happy kid seeing things truly for the first time in the view finder and the mind's eye, revealed on the plate and paper.
www.timburns-art.com for other work and background information; this functions as an on-line portfolio for me.
tim
Comments (17)
Fidelity2
Yeah! I love it all the way. 5+.
vintorix
Unusual impressive and interesting. It looks precisly as the old technique with several layers of semitransparent underpaint.
helanker
OH WOW ! I like this very much. ! Zoom is a Must here, becaust that is when you see all the exting details and there are many of them. A very beautiful and interesting Image.
blankfrancine
Great creation! Amazing technique and controlled passion.
groegnitram
quite another beauty in your series, i just thought, it must be fantastic to see them all side by side together! what a wonderful unique technique this is :)
ARTWITHIN
This makes my heart beat faster, Tim. I love this so much. A definite fav. The dimentional appearing roundish objects make this image, expecially the one with the cutout. Stunning image!
Marinette
Great creation!:)
jocko500
cool looking
mss
I enjoy the colors and looking through the layers of this image. Do I see some of the reflective aluminum showing through, making it iridescent in parts? Did you use clear acrylic (gesso?) ?
anaber
This is very profound.I feel a rytmic interaction between the shapes,the organic formes, the strong colours and some cracked textures like the fine and bright golden, and others are undiscerned and submerged.There is much energy and much activity here; i "feel" the number three in your piece and this is important for sure:"three" stones or so..,the blue colour divided into "three" parts and the orange colour too.This is very spiritual indeed and FABULOUS!!Congratulations,Tim.
e-brink
Absolutely wonderful! Such striking colours and form.
kasalin
Beautiful image and very creative artwork !!! Excellent:):):) 5*
anahata.c
oh, this is a real cornucopia...and yes, zoom is essential in all your work, there's too much at the intimate level that can't be seen in display mode... there;s a sense of occlusions of bodies over bodies, and there's a sense of bodies emerging out of primal mire or ooze (primal relating to the threshold levels of meditation & inner consciousness—to make it relevant to your series). And then you apply your razor-sharp intuition: the inexplicables, the things that make utter sense in the image but defy explanation from the normal plane of reality: ie, the almost iridescent blue bands with those strange primal symbols on them (intuition unleashed in meditative consciousness); the blotches & lights throughout, whose hues are quite vivid and yet seem half submerged, the way we'd picture light to be just as it emerges out of its source & half-formed and looking primordial; the reds against blues (basic optical contrast—the impressionists loved to make optical contrasts to get glimmer, as you know); the golden orbs; and your background areas where—whoosh—your intuitions gushed and took over. It took over part of your orbs, it broke up your surfaces, it created matter crackling & forming colonies, it created layered backgrounds (suzanne does these as well, in fact as few alive), it created modulations within a single hue...Tim, you're intuitions are alive and picking up signals from the edges of the reality, and this is a truly magnificent vision. Relation to meditation? It's primal, at the beginning, matter & light as it's just beginning to merge, and playing with form, line, light, glow, as first-events...Wonderful. (Ana's comment inspires me greatly, I love her observation on 3's...3 is one of the key spiritual numbers across culture; 7's another, etc...)
Burpee
I just got to watch a demonstration by November22 tonight and am very impressed. His work look outstanding when you are holding it in your hands. Fabulous colors and technique. Well done.
Chipka
This is astonishingly good and incredibly rich in all sorts of details that strike me like ghost-images glimpsed only from the corner of the eye, but never full on. That's superb. The color-sense is great, as is the whole byplay between the various forms. I like art that tends to the organic, the natural, and the spiritual, and this does so in spades. It's a kind of "membranous" work, as I've noticed most of your work is, in that it seems to occupy spaces between things--ways of seeing, ways of thinking, digital/analog, etc...and that is something that I find intriguing, and endlessly rewarding as a viewer/observer. Fantastic work
ekatz
wonderful
nikolais
excellent!