ArtistsNetwork.com 77says, “because it starts right at the
viewer’s feet. It sets a stage and zooms
the viewer right in just the way real
life does.” Landscape elements such
as trees and rocks cropped at the
painting’s edges suggest that the
forms continue beyond the world of
the image. Although the mass of cliffs
and trees are truncated at either side
of the painting in Ruffled Water, High
Tide (opposite), the long foreground
reflection into gently moving water
extends the illusion of space into the
bottom half of the piece.
In Summer Afternoon (opposite),
Burtt struggled to paint the mountain
in the background, trying to capture
its enormous presence against the gar-
den foreground. She painted it so large
that she ended up painting it off of the
top of the canvas. It was a revelation.
“If you cut off the top of the tree, it
looks like it goes on forever,” she says.
“If you cut off the mountain, who
knows where it ends? There’s an impli-
cation of grandeur by not surrounding
everything and making it look small,
as if enclosing it in the picture frame.”
Burtt uses acrylics and begins each
piece with a 1½-inch Isacryl filbert
brush, working in big blocks of color
and then using progressively smaller
brushes to add the details. She blazes
into her work sans drawing or a color
plan to address the surfaces of water
and sky as three-dimensional forms;
however, she doesn’t intentionally
underpaint to achieve that dimen-
sionality. “It’s all trial and error,”
the artist says. “I never know what
I’m going to do. I just paint over big
areas frequently and over small areas
consistently, so that it’s always under-
painting. It wouldn’t be fun for me to
have to plan it out.”
Her approach to color is similarly
intuitive; it’s not based on a premedi-
tated scheme or formula. A pale
yellow moon surrounded by a laven-
der sky is contrasted by an intense
orange illuminating a sandbar in
High Tide, Moonrise (above). “I look
at what’s in front of me, and I paint
that,” Burtt says. “I try to believe
what I’m seeing instead of referring
to a system or some way that I know
is supposed to be.”LETTING THE
DETAILS SPEAK
Burtt wants to deliver a kind of verac-
ity in her paintings, but her intent is
far from photorealistic representa-
tion. Instead, it’s about embracing the
energy of the setting.
She believes that the large forms of
the ocean, sky and sand provide a set-
ting in which the small details can
speak. “If I can give what I think of
now as pixels, or what Cézanne would
call a tache—a ‘touch’—each little
area just the right value and color and
expressiveness as I want, I don’t really
have to go small,” she says. “I don’tsee things that way. I believe that if
a touch conveys the meaning, shape
and form, then I don’t have to paint
every leaf.”ENCODING THE
EXPERIENCE ON CANVAS
Intense yellows slashed with bold blue
strokes in Low Tide, End of Day, Torrey
Pines (opposite) celebrate the late
afternoon glow of sunlight reflecting
in still water. The colors recall one of
Burtt’s biggest influences: Vincent
van Gogh. She speaks with reverence
about the passion with which he
painted, and she strives to bring this
spirit to her own process.
“When you’re working with great
abandon and intensity and love,”
Burtt says, “you don’t think about
it, but somehow you’re encoding your
experience onto the canvas. If people,
later on, look at that canvas with an
open heart and an open mind, they
can sense what you were feeling and
understand what you were trying
to say.”Susan Byrnes (susanbstudio.com) is
a visual artist whose work encompasses
traditional and contemporary forms
and practices, including sculpture,
multimedia installation, radio broad-
casts, writing and curatorial projects.High Tide, Moonrise
acrylic on paper, 7x18
VISIT THE ARTIST’S WEBSITE AT
MARCIABURTT.COM.