Essays
Below are a selection of essays that highlight Christopher's work over the years. These writings are taken from both of Christopher's publications and walk us through his work in a special way.
Glimpses of Paradise: Beauty and the Natural World in the Photography of Christopher Burkett
by Vincent Rossi
Dostoevsky said that "beauty will save the world." It is not merely a coincidence that the author of that statement was a member of the Eastern (Russian) Orthodox Christian Church. Dostoevsky here speaks not specifically as a novelist, nor as an aesthete, nor even as a Russian, but primarily as an Orthodox Christian. The heart of the Eastern Orthodox response to caring for creation, which has as its basis the universal Christian principle of love of the natural world as a being-duty, is the recognition that the natural world is the creation of God, who willed the creation into being through love and as beauty. It is by the beauty inherent in creation that we recognize the hand of God upon it. The truly human response to beauty is to savor it, to protect it, to preserve it and, above all, to share it.
by James Alinder
Christopher Burkett is the hardest-working artist I know. For two months of each year he searches for subject matter, driving about the country with his wife Ruth to discover locales where distinct images can be unearthed. The other ten months he spends printing in the darkroom, logging six, fourteen-hour days each week. Burkett developed this high degree of discipline, both physical and mental, and forged what would become his creative philosophy during his seven years as a brother in a Christian order. The principles of simple, devout living that he learned as a member of a monastic community have remained with him as he has developed both his artistic vision and daily routine. Over the past twenty-five years Burkett has produced an extraordinary body of creative work, one remarkable in the history of photography.
Nature Always Wears the Colors of the Spirit
by James Enyeart
Christopher Burkett’s photographs of nature have bridged a most precarious artistic chasm, which is the critical and aesthetic distance between tradition and new vision. Those artists working within a tradition, or those who are seen to be doing so, are generally sent to the back of the bus in terms of critical interest, especially in America. While we revere history and all of its glorious achievements, we are generally reluctant to nurture it as an ongoing mentor to contemporary life and culture. Although no one denies the lessons to be learned from the past and its traditions, especially those that shine as great contributions to various aspects of culture, it is our sense of the present that is ever the dominant source of our aesthetic philosophies and beliefs. This is the disconnect in American art, which relegates ideas and forms of expression to periods of time as if they were succinct chapters in a book, whole and complete, used up in both content and context. We treat traditions, artistic or otherwise, as the paths upon which we now trod in impatient quest of the new.
Vital Form and Radiant Light: A Painter Explores the Photographs of Christopher Burkett
by James Reid
Viewers of Christopher Burkett's work often remark with pleasure that they feel as if they were looking at paintings, while they know that the pictures are, in fact, photographs. Such was indeed our own first impression, renewed with each subsequent viewing: these photographs are, in a certain striking way, like paintings. Yet they do not imitate obvious "painterly" effects of brushstrokes, blending of colored pastes, or impressionistic blurring of detail. Rather, they have a quality which only the best paintings achieve. What this quality is, and how it is manifested in Christopher's photographs—these are the issues which this essay, written by a painter, will explore.