60 Shades of Burton Gray – post-abstract surrealist painter
Burton Gray in his studio, located in The Brewery Complex, north of downtown Los Angeles. Photo by Gloria Plascencia
You’ve taken your four-year-old son to church or to choir practice and you want him to sit still and somehow not be bored, so what do you do? Burton Gray’s mother handed him a pencil and a pad of paper. He was still too young to write his memoirs, but old enough to start drawing. In the quarter of a century since then, Burton Gray has gone from low-tech to high-tech, but he’s never ceased making art.
Growing up in Rolling Hills, Gray was an only child whose parents didn’t want him watching TV or playing video games, and that seems to have been fine by him: “I’m one of those kids that didn’t want friends to call and bother him on weekends because I just wanted to draw.” It didn’t occur to him until later that this was a little unusual. Doesn’t every boy want lots of playmates?
Somewhere between kindergarten and first grade Gray was given informal art lessons by a neighbor who was himself taking art classes, and who gladly shared whatever techniques he was learning. George Gunza and his wife often babysat Gray while the lad’s parents were at work. Also, Gray recalls, “My grandparents would watch over me every few weeks out of the year and they had a giant Norman Rockwell book. He’s probably my biggest influence technically.”
While kids anywhere could in theory be influenced by Rockwell’s pictures of Main Street Americana, not many of them would have had their aesthetics shaped by coming of age on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
The house where Burton Gray was raised overlooks one of the canyon hills, and he speaks fondly of the “fluffy green foliage and the sharp whites of the houses with orange roofs” as well as the organic flow of the land down to the clifftops and then the sudden transition from earth to water. He uses the phrase “transitional elements” to describe how one form segues into another. “On top of that there’s the view of all of the L.A. basin and the ocean and the mountains in the distance.” Subliminally, the landscape of his youth helped shape Burton Gray into the painter he is today, with one form seamlessly merging into another.
“Lily,” by Burton Gray, part of the Incarnation series. Evolution date: Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2009, at 2:00 p.m.
Evolving doors
“I went to intermediate school at what is now P.V. High School,” Gray says, which had been a high school much earlier as well, before the baby boomers of the previous generation grew up and flew the coop. His high school years were spent back in Rolling Hills, at Palos Verdes Peninsula High School.
Meanwhile, on his own time, Gray continued to draw.
“In high school I didn’t take an art class until my senior year, and it was just, like Art 101. By then I was already pretty good. I was already classified as the artist guy in school. I didn’t take art classes, but I’ve been drawing all my life.”
After briefly attending El Camino College, Gray studied at Art Center in Pasadena where he received a BFA in Illustration with a Minor in Fine Art. However, what Gray attributes to his schooling was the fact that it provided him with a technical foundation. School gives you pointers, he says, but as for the creative skills, “everyone has to learn it for themselves.”
Putting it another way, he adds, “To be an artist you don’t need to go to art school: you learn like 10 to 20 different things and you practice them. It’s mostly practice.”
By this time Gray was an accomplished oil painter. There was a period here of about ten years where he did a lot of graphic design for his father’s company (“I didn’t have much of a social life”), years which were otherwise occupied by his huge appetite for painting. But while in school he’d taken a digital painting class: “It was so I could learn how to photograph my oil paintings and test things digitally before I committed to painting them in oil.”
Until that time, the very idea of painting digitally seemed unnatural. Gray fought it, although he began to see and appreciate and understand its many advantages, similar to how writers can save their drafts and then go back to previous ones if necessary. An oil painter doesn’t have drafts; if the artist finds an earlier design preferable, he or she will have to redo the whole shebang or just start over.
So what convinced him to give up oil painting altogether? Well, the technology kept getting better and better, and Gray pursued the best computers and printers on the market. He even claims that the colors he can achieve are more vibrant than what he can achieve in oil. Looking around his studio, I’d be hard pressed to disagree. The downside, he says, is that now he wants to go back and keep working on his pictures, although this has led to a concept Gray calls “Living Art.” His motto seems to be: “They live within me, they evolve with me, they die with me.” Now, what exactly does this mean?
“Holly,” by Burton Gray, from the Animal series. Evolution date: May 11, 2012, at 12:46 p.m.
It’s alive!
“Galleries want limited edition prints or one-off oil paintings,” Gray says. “If you do limited edition prints of something that’s still evolving and changing, (galleries) might sell a couple,” but as it evolves “no one’s going to want the old version. Some will. But the point is, they might feel cheated.”
Well, that depends on how one looks at this. Each digitally-painted print is double-dated. There is the date on which the work was first created, and a date on which the image was printed and signed. There’s also a middle date, an evolution date, that is, if the initial image has been returned to and modified. If this isn’t clear, you can shoot the messenger. On the one hand, to quote Picasso, as Gray does, “To finish [a painting] means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul.”
Hmm, maybe, or maybe not. A buyer of an early print, before modifications, might think that he or she had acquired a prototype rather than a complete work. On the other hand, this isn’t necessarily true as we know from the painted sketches of, say, Rubens or Constable, which are now often valued more highly for their dynamic qualities. Also, because Gray can at any time go back to a previous composition – all he needs to do is boot up his computer – there’s the sense, as he indicates, that the work’s best years may actually lie ahead. “It’s just starting to get interesting now,” he says. “I’ve no idea what’s going to happen, but I’m hoping to have a long life so we can see if this Living Art experiment works out.” I’m thinking of Arnold Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead,” a picture for dreaming, in which there are at least five different versions, each one begun from scratch. Imagine if he’d had Gray’s technology at his disposal.
“Transition,” by Burton Gray, part of the Sad Robot series. Evolution date: August 4, 2014, at 3:36 p.m.
What we lose, of course, is the texture, and the scent, of oil on canvas. For many artists, that materiality is an essential part of the art. Even so, Gray claims, he doesn’t skimp on costs: “I use the best inks, and I use the best quality American paper which is Museo Silver Rag. The surface quality is nice and the vibrancy is top notch.”
But how do we know we’re buying an original Burton Gray? Ah, I’m glad you asked.
First, in addition to a signature, signed and dated on the back, he thumbprints each print, also on the back or below the image. “I thumbprint it as a symbol that I’m actually making this art, so it’s touching my hand at the very least. The thumbprint is to drive home the fact that it’s coming from me, the artist, and not from some random person out in the middle of nowhere.
As if that isn’t enough to guarantee authenticity, Gray also uses an embossed logo, an impression of his face. Needless to say, all of this would be hard to duplicate.
The pleasure principle
Although many artists are reluctant to label themselves, Gray seems to be comfortable being called a post-abstract surrealist, his work possibly described as figurative with biomorphic tendencies (i.e., forms evolving into other forms). That is, he’s definitely not Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock, but largely a mixture of his influences, which range from Rockwell, as noted, to Dali, Picasso, and the more contemporary Mark Ryden.
But in some ways Norman Rockwell is an exact opposite because his slices of Americana are narratives that tell a story, whereas Gray constructs many of his works so that it is the viewer who finds and constructs a story of their choosing.
Burton Gray’s seal of approval – and authenticity. Photo by Gloria Plascencia
“I’m trying to make images that are fruit or candy for the mind, not eye-candy,” Gray says, but something that “attracts the mind so it starts thinking about it and triggers new experiences.” A perfect example would be “Blue Gold,” one of many pictures that Gray has been evolving over time. However, the image can’t be haphazard or feel unfocused. “It’s like comedy in the sense that it either works or it doesn’t work,” Gray explains; “you either laugh or you don’t laugh. In art, it is or isn’t beautiful. It doesn’t have to be beautiful in the sense of pretty, but beautiful in the sense that it’s compelling and draws your eye” and thus the attention of the viewer. “That’s the ultimate goal as an artist, that’s the driving force.”
For this writer, the discovery and draw of Burton Gray’s work came quite by accident while looking over the season brochure for Los Cancioneros Master Chorale, which is based locally with performances four times a year at the James Armstrong Theatre in Torrance. The creamy texture of the illustrations, the sure handling of forms and the tonal values or color palette – I knew this wasn’t the work of an amateur. As it turned out, this longtime vocal group (currently led by Dr. Joanna Medawar Nachef) was a favorite of Gray’s grandmother, and both of his parents presently sing with the choir.
“Blue Gold,” by Burton Gray. Evolution date: Tuesday, June 10, 2014, at 2:23 a.m.
One might expect to find that Gray employs live models, but this is rarely the case. “I work from imagination unless it’s a portrait and I want it to look like someone. In art school I painted 10,000 figures and so I can just invent the figure for the most part.” To show that he simply isn’t exaggerating, Gray gives a demonstration and in only a few minutes he has created a portrait as if out of thin air. Of course, what’s behind the result of those few minutes are the 10,000 figures and the many years of drawing and painting.
Every picture sings a song
While some artists will speak of “thinking outside the box,” Gray’s credo as an artist is actually to stay within the box – that is, within the square or rectangle of his composition, and to pack it with as much (or as little) information as his idea for the work requires. Within a confined space, the question he asks of himself is this: “How can I make this little square sing?” He mentions orchestration, and truly each work – for the viewer who pauses to listen – has its own rhythm, melody, and mood.
“Gray,” as it turns out, is not really Burton Gray’s last name, but he decided it was easier to remember than Landhuis. Also, he adds, “The reason I chose ‘Gray’ is because that’s my favorite color, because it’s more than a color; it’s not even a color it’s like the middle point between all the other colors, like midway between red and green is a gray.” And that’s his notion of art, as well, which is to take different elements, locate the gray in the middle, and then expand it outwards again into new forms and ideas.
Artist Burton Gray with “Skull,” one of several evolutions. Photo by Gloria Plascencia
Beginning with oil and then transitioning to digital painting did not dilute Gray’s passion for his craft. “Most of the things I love are still there and image-making is what it’s all about for me. I just make images that I like, and then I try to find the audience for them.”
Today, Burton Gray works and resides in The Brewery Complex, which is north of downtown Los Angeles. For more information about his work or studio visits, go to www.burtongray.com.