Barbara Burger

Barbara Burger				Gallery II			January 5 - January 30, 2008

Images	I	Resume	I	Statement	I	Purchase Painting or Catalogue
	Sonnet #73: The Yellow Leaves Series Like everything else in life, art is an ongoing journey of discovery. All the arts are an essential part of this journey, reflecting and clarifying every aspect of life. The separate worlds of art and music or of thought and words provide complimentary insights into who we are and what we are doing here. Each is essential. The city I live in, New York City, connects so deeply to so many of the arts that it, too, has become a source of artistic inspiration for me. Previous series have explored some of the city’s aspects. These include the beauty of Central Park through various seasons; the majesty of the city’s bridges; the geometry of structures as mundane as its subway systems and even construction sites; and the wonder of the skies overhead that contain and frame metropolitan rooftops. Recently, poetry has become a singular imperative for me and so this series of paintings combine images of the eye and the mind. The paintings seemed to emerge as I was strolling through Central Park during late autumn days, and words of a well-loved Shakespearean sonnet seemed to be appearing all around. The bare tree branches contained a mere hint here and there of yellow leaves, and Shakespeare’s sonnet echoed and reechoed. “That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang upon those boughs…” And the series just took shape. Was it perhaps because I identified so deeply with the physical counterpart before me of words that moved me so? The combined effect of words and scene seemed simultaneously tangible and intangible; both of this world and otherworldly. It was as if I had sensed among that which is real, intimations of something deeper than and beyond the merely physical. These are distilled images and are about cycles and about transience. As such, they tend to seek more in less. They omit as much as they contain, conveying absence and presence. These images suggest the insubstantial center of all life: both a timeless essence and an emptiness around and within all that is material. “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,” in haunting words of the poet Wallace Stevens. Barbara Burger