Guy Burwell
GUYBURWELL's distinctive line work can be like a kick in the teeth, all hard lines and action, giving the impression that the art might cut your skin if you get too close. At other times, he can fill the lines with helium, floating the images just beyond the grip of reality in pools of color that aren't meant to coexist peacefully. Any which way you approach the images, give them a good close look because there are things to see well beyond the cursory glance. But never. Ever. Turn your back on them. If you want flat, boring, empty, meaningless, common, pseudo contemporary counter culture corn, you can get that anywhere. For GUYBURWELL, you can only come to the source."
-M. E. Cargill - PORTLAND 2008
"My paintings and illustrations don't handle serious topics in a head-on manner. Some of them have underlying currents that project my own skewed sense of humor on a certain topical notion. Sometimes the work makes a wry comment on social issues in the undercurrents of a piece. I try to go for 'fun' or 'cool' in my work and that seems to hit the right chords with my viewers. The point is often left to be discovered in it's own time, the proper details surfacing to coherence over time. You're sitting on the couch two years later and you realize: hey, that fellow in the painting is picking his nose! Things like that. Smart stuff. With heart."
"I am a commercial artist, foremost, and bring a degree of popular class appeal to everything I do. Ultimately I want to produce what I want to produce, whatever the venue, outlet, medium. I work constantly, be it for pay or pleasure, day in and day out. All day every day. Home or away, I am always thinking about work. It's not manic, but it's always there. I have a photograph of myself on my wall, age three or four or five, bent in concentration over a sheet of paper, pencil nub in hand, and it's been a constant reminder, and an ideal to live up to. Who wouldn't want to do this? Nobody, that's who." -GB
Exhibits