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05/15/2006: "Steven Burkart" by Walter King
I’ve spoken of my friend Steven Burkart before. Steve was an older student in my color class in the mid 80’s. He stood out from the rest of the younger freshmen because he actually knew who the painters were that I spoke about in class. We became friends after the class was completed and I hired Steve to paint my house that summer. Steve showed up one day to work on the upper front of my house and mentioned that he’d found a great studio/loft near downtown Columbus that was just to cheap to be true. We drove over to see it and we rented it. Thus began one of the most enjoyable, prolific and satisfying periods of my life. Steve and I shared the space, about 1200 sq. feet with 15’ high ceilings, overlooking downtown Columbus for 8 years. Shortly after that Steve rented the house behind mine across the alley and we also became neighbors. He eventually rented some of the rooms out to other students so there were always a handful of kids over at my house for barbecues, in my driveway working on their cars or mine, and always we talked about art. As students graduated they moved away and eventually Steven began to hear the call to New York. He lives there now with his fiance, Dana, in another studio loft in an old warehouse (Steven has a knack for finding great space for less than most of us have to pay) and he works for the Museum of Modern Art as an art handler. Recently I had the pleasure of writing a piece about his work for a big show in Naples Florida called “ABSTRACTION:Recent works on Paper and Canvas by Steven Burkart” which ran from Dec 05 to January 06. Here is what I wrote.
“ Steven Burkart’s abstract color images have been developing over many years. What began as a kind of expressionist chromatic exploration soon became inscribed with singular, linear self enclosed shapes describing and marking the color space. The figures in the sense that a letter or number might be called a figure, seemed to circle or meander within the four corners of the canvas while trying to avoid the edges. These figures remained embedded in the oil and wax surfaces of Burkart’s vibrant red, blue, yellow and green hues for some time.
After moving to New York from Ohio in 1995 his images began to take on a new kind of sensibility. The figures began to dissipate. For a brief period it seemed that only the most singular sense of color would survive. Red, blue or green was built up with layers of subtle tonal shifts, neutralized hue overlaid stronger intensities, warms over cools until a kid of crescendo of redness or blueness exploded. He often paired two colors as ‘diptychs’, one canvas of the same size next to another, setting up the sense of chromatic acoustics. Then those diptychs were reduced again to single canvases where vertical and horizontal bars of color pushed in from and up against the edges of the painting suggesting walls, horizons or light outside a window. The color space became palpable.While the color and textures in these later works were similar to previous images he began to take a very meas5red approach. Every brush or palette knife stroke, change in tone or color shift, counter balance of thick to smooth texture, distances between shapes, size, position within the field of the support is concretely felt because of the measure of one element against another. The intensity derived from such careful balancing is tremendous, sometimes tense and taught , sometimes sensuous and always quite luminous.”
Of course I own some of Steven’s work, some were gifts, we traded some things over the years, and when he moved out of the studio he left a a number of works behind that he didn‘t feel like keeping in an attempt to thin down the amount of stuff he‘d have to store in New York (along with a ton of half spent tubes of oil paint which I am using to this day.) A few months after Steve took off for the big city I had to leave the warehouse studio as well moving into the garage I’ve converted behind my new house-- not so new anymore as I’ve been here about as long or longer than we shared that downtown loft. I recently cleaned my current studio and came across a number of Steven’s work, drawings and prints, mostly. I’ve included scans of some of these along with work from his recent Naples show. Included is a self portrait he did most likely in a junior drawing class while in school here at CCAD, a small etching (an aqua-tint) of a bowl on a table that shows him moving in the more minimal direction he now inhabits and a silkscreen that tentatively explores the possibilities inherent in color and texture, another hallmark of his recent work.
Steve is an easy going guy, often quiet, though not averse to socializing with friends at the Ale House just up the street from his Williamsburg loft, or at the apartment of the Ale House owners down in Greenpoint. He’s got an intense eye for color, for line, for relationships of space and form. Of course Steven’s recent work brings to mind painters like Hans Hoffman, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clifford Still among others. Steven, although steeped in the work of these 50’s painters, has his own Zen like sense about what he is doing. Or maybe it could be described as in another article I wrote for one of his Ohio shows while we were studio mates-- like a jazz musician responding in controlled nuance to the notes struck by himself or another player in a solo break within a structured series of chords, rhythms and measure. He even uses the invitations and post cards other artist friends send him as the under paintings for some of his color sketches by overlaying his textured color strokes in response to some textural or color aspect of the printed images sometimes obliterating all but a ghost of the original image, while at other times allowing just enough to show yet changing that image forever into his own work. 
Steven himself talks about these works coming from memories of the flat expanses of Northern Ohio and the wide oceanic horizons of coastal New York and California. Steve was raised in Ohio and studied business in Los Angeles before coming back to Ohio to go to art school. But these landscape like images are more of an excuse to move paint around and to study his own soul. As Steven puts it “I enjoy the tense sensuality of painted surfaces, the layering of strokes, reacting to tactile tonalities, the measurement of color, relationships of shape and scale.” These are quiet works that often whisper in close color tonalities, or sometimes its a chromatic sizzle like bacon on the griddle or the sound of an arc welder at work. But the color is never harsh on the eyes.
Having known Steven for some twenty years I have a sense of him as someone who pays attention to these same things whether he’s looking at the horizon at the edge of the sea, a verdant Ohio pasture, or while he sits at his dining room table and contemplates one of his recent works hanging on the wall across the loft’s ample space-- like the large red and yellow piece (about 6 ‘ x 7’) hanging behind him in this photo I took last spring.
