Eon Burchman plays with light, the light plays back

EON BURCHMAN: PAINTER OF LIGHT

Eon Burchman’s exquisite, shimmering canvases are the stuff of wonder, not only drawing the viewer in but, at times, sending them to the other side. It’s been like this ever since Burchman started showing his landscapes and hummingbird studies. At an outdoor show in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, his paintings were hung in a nylon tent where Burchman was not only pleased to see people taken with his work, but amused to notice more than a few looking behind the pictures.

“They assumed the light coming off the pictures was light coming through the tent,” he said. “They thought it was going through the tent and shining through the canvas.”

Nope. Though Burchman’s work exudes light—seems to be producing the stuff—they are not doing so through the use of a thin canvas or accent lights. Yet the light is unmistakable—emanating, it seems, directly from the center of the paintings and radiating out, sometimes so intensely you feel the need to squint. Sometimes, because the light changes in intensity and direction from time to time.

Talking about his paintings at Portfolio Coffee House, where they have hung for the past month and will remain until the end of September, Burchman can explain that painting with gold leaf will create that glistening quality that collects light and throws it back at the viewer.

“Though the light seems to be coming from the painting, it’s actually reflecting the ambient light,” he said. “It absorbs the light, then reflects it back out.”

Of course, that could also describe a mirror. Burchman’s trick is to take a surface that’s flat, shiny and clean—he works in a near-sterile studio to avoid dust, hair or dirt finding their way onto his canvas—and infuse it with depth and warmth. And though Burchman can tell you how the light is reflected, he seems to take pleasure in the fact that he has little idea when and where this will happen, especially if one of his paintings is hung by a window. Then his work, interacting with the movement of the day, acts as a sort of gorgeous, heartening sundial, the light in constant flux, growing, receding, moving.

His most popular subjects, and the main subjects of his Portfolio show, are hummingbirds (he’s already sold several hummingbird canvases). In pairs and solo, wings spread, he manages to make them look majestic even in their smallness, which Burchman plays up by always placing them off center, usually up and toward the right corner. (When I told Burchman the bit about the birds looking majestic and proud, particularly one fluttering on a on a radiant green background, he laughed and said his mother, the artist Carolyn Reynolds, had noticed the same bird but singled it out because “she thought it looked fat.”)

The son of artist Robert Burchman and Carolyn Reynolds—who named him, he says, “by opening up a dictionary and pointing”—he grew up in an artistic home where his first love was music, which he plays professionally. As leader of the Eon Burchman Trio—he plays jazz guitar—he will soon lead his group into the studio to record their first CD. It was working with his mother that drew him to gold leaf, and he started to take the visual side of his artistry more seriously. Reynolds remains a big influence on his work. Though he lives in Long Beach, he works out of her Laguna Beach studio, and his original shows, including the Jackson Hole appearance, were as an accessory to his mother’s better-known collection.

“When it comes to art,” he said. “I’ve been a coattail rider.”

But the Portfolio show may go a long way toward changing that, though even there you can see the influence of Reynolds, especially in his landscapes. They feature reverse negative trees on golden lakes, very similar to Reynolds’ own work. What distinguishes mother and son’s landscapes is that while Carolyn’s remain beautiful and comforting, Eon’s seem to morph into something foreboding. The precise and sharpened strokes suggest something lurking in the darkened forest just out of sight. Then again, I just may have seen Deliverance one too many times, which would explain my strange aversion to banjos and forced sodomy.

EON BURCHMAN PORFOLIO COFFEE HOUSE | 2300 E FOURTH ST | LONG BEACH 90814 | 562.434.2486 | PORTFOLIOCOFFEEHOUSE.COM | CLOSES END OF SEPTEMEBER

Tags: eon burchman, gold leaf, painter of light