Sequential Realities

James Burke, a Louisiana treasure, continues to inspire his audiences to see outside the box. Through his use of structure and nature, Burke asks us to join him in getting lost. He encourages us to let go of perspectives we know and lean in to something familiar yet unexpected.

“The paintings are about places familiar to me, some for more than 50 years.  What I tease out of them as I construct, reconstruct, or deconstruct is what I have to show. Each is finished when it becomes something new. When it shows me what I never knew was there.

The intaglio prints are about a different landscape, an interior mental one, which has evolved since the 70’s and is populated by forms and shapes which allude to both the animate and inanimate aspects of the world around us.  

In the smaller paintings especially, I’ve juxtaposed and combined elements from both of these landscapes, often using in the paintings the look of some traditional and historic printmaking techniques.”

James Burke is one of the most influential contemporary arts figures in South Louisiana serving a professor emeritus of the LSU School of Art, where he taught intaglio printmaking for 31 years.

Burke was a founding member of Unity 8 Gallery, which went on to become Baton Rouge Gallery center for contemporary art in 1966. Burke has exhibited his prints extensively in local and national exhibitions. His work is in many private collections and museums, including the New Orleans Museum of Art; the LSU Museum of Art; the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina; the Wichita Art Association; the Delgado Museum of Art in New Orleans; the Dulin Galleries in Knoxville, Tennessee; and New York University at Potsdam