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.

 

Christopher does not simply record superficial appearances after the fashion of so many image manufacturers of recent times, photographic or otherwise. Rather, like the greatest painters, he penetrates deep inside the mystery of what appears in nature, and brings into being before our eyes works of art which manifest the inner light, the living, organic structure, of nature. Because we will be exploring this essential connection between the photography of Christopher Burkett and the work of the great painters, let us first take a few moments to look at the essential requirements of painting.

 

The first challenge faced by a pictorial artist is the difficulty of achieving space on a flat surface. Our experience of space in the world is largely kinesthetic, depending upon the sensation of our bodies' movement, our feeling of the forces of gravity and equilibrium, and the ever-varying correlation between optical stimuli and eye movements, including binocular convergence, accommodation to focal distance, and parallax. An arbitrary "snapshot," however, presents a purely optical impression, a jumble of variously shaped tones removed from their spatial context. From being accustomed to viewing such flat images, we develop a "space blindness." The eye seizes upon recognizable details and, by a conventional sort of "leap of credulity," accepts the flat image as referring to things one has experienced in the world. The difference between flatness and space collapses.

 

The opposite happens in great paintings. There, our experience of space is heightened. In a masterpiece of Rembrandt or Raphael, Giotto or Picasso, for example, a feeling of depth is created by the pushing and pulling of shapes and colors. All the lines and tones are organized, at once musically and architectonically, in such a way as to give the viewer a path or paths of movement into and out of depth; and this depth is made palpable by the tension between it and the flatness of the pictorial surface. The real experience of space in a painting is not quantitative, dependent upon the suggestion of deep vistas; rather, it is qualitative, dependent upon the resonance of the tension between the flat plane and all the pushing and pulling planes of color. The difference between flatness and space is not collapsed in painting; it is amplified.

 

To a very great extent, our mental picture of the world, that project upon our sensory contact with things, is determined by the images which pervade our culture. If the pervading images are flat, consisting of mere snapshots and a debased kind of painting which ignores the necessity to create pictorial space, then for us the world itself becomes flattened, suffocating, frozen—a place where one cannot act freely, or even breathe.

 

Art both expresses and molds our view of reality. A clear view of things reveals an inescapable connection among nature, art and human destiny. It makes a tremendous difference whether we view reality as flat, frozen and fragmented, or as full and spacious, whole and living; whether we see the world as a machine, a lifeless thing, or as an organism filled with breath, with spirit.

 

That art should be organic and whole, full of life and movement, is the universal testimony of art history, from ancient cave paintings to modern art, and from every continent and culture. It is commonly acknowledged, especially among artists, that a work of art must be alive and organic, must exhibit living form and contain feeling

 

The great painter Henri Matisse describes the artistic process in this way:

      “The first step toward creation is to see everything as it really is, and that demands a constant effort... A work of art is the climax of long work of preparation. The artist takes from his surroundings everything that can nourish his internal vision... He enriches himself internally with all the forms he has mastered and which he will one day set to a new rhythm. It is in the expression of this rhythm that the artist's work becomes really creative. To achieve it, he will have to sift rather than accumulate details, selecting for example, from all possible combinations, the line that expresses most and gives life to the drawing; he will have to seek the equivalent terms by which the facts of nature are transposed into art.... That is the sense, so it seems to me, in which art may be said to imitate nature, namely, by work will then appear as fertile and as possessed of the same power to thrill, the same resplendent beauty as we find in works of nature.

Great love is needed to achieve this effect, a love capable of inspiring and sustaining that patient striving towards truth, that glowing warmth and that analytic profundity that accompany the birth of any work of art. But is not love the origin of all creation?”

 

Has the camera, itself a machine, influenced us to see mechanistically, to miss the spiritual depth which underlies appearances, the love which sustains creation? The camera is innocent; the problem is that it is generally used without wisdom. The picture-taker trusts the machine to reproduce the way things look. Such a use of the camera expresses a prior tendency to reduce the world to its material dimensions. This is a widespread cultural tendency, not limited to photography. In fact, by the time photography began to be popularized, the art of painting had generally fallen to the level of a superficial and almost mechanical imitation of appearances. Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso and others worked, with insight and courage, to reverse this trend at the beginning of the twentieth century; but their work has not been widely understood, and visual culture has continued to devolve.

 

Now, the camera need not serve mechanistic vision, just as a painter's brush need not serve the mechanical "copying" of appearances. How can photography transcend the mechanism of the camera? Can a photographer work by enriching his internal vision, as Matisse insisted the artist must do? Can he sift rather than accumulate details? Can he infuse life into his work? Indeed, can photography itself reverse the devolution of vision which has led contemporary art to despair of finding any meaning or life in the appearances of things? Yes, it can happen. Now, in the work of Christopher Burkett, we are seeing it happen.

 

See this miracle of art! In his hands the equipment and techniques of photography-the camera, the darkroom processes-lose their mechanical individuality and are transformed into extensions of the artist's faculties, just as a painter's palette and brushes do not interpose themselves between the painter and nature or between him and his work, but rather, as extensions of his hand, serve as subtle instruments of creation.

 

Indeed, Christopher's hand is involved in every phase of his work, printing as well as photographing, and everything in between. A tremendous labor of love goes into each print. Countless hours are spent working with contrast masks and wands, dodging and burning to adjust the contrasts and passages of tone, the subtle relationships of warm and cool notes, the precise intervals of pitch within each area and among all the components of a picture. He is like an orchestra conductor, making sure each part keeps its proper place in the symphony. Mozart once explained that he put together notes that love each other. Matisse, speaking about the necessity of establishing a rapport or relationship among all the colors in a picture if one is not to use colors in vain, said "Rapport is the affinity between things, the common language; rapport is love, yes love." This love, the "origin of all creation" in nature and in art, flows from Christopher's hands to imbue and inform every moment of his work, establishing the perfect rapport among all the parts-not as static balance but as a dynamic, unceasing exchange-and shining forth in every print as a revelation of the inner life of nature.

 

Let us look attentively at one of Christopher's photographs. In Aspen Grove, Colorado, 1993, the stately verticals of the foreground trees step across the picture plane from left to right, a procession of upward soaring aspens. They seem not to spend or diminish their energy in their ascent, but to actually gain in power, a dynamism which makes itself felt in the intervals between trees. Spontaneously, without a break in their procession, the expansive élan of their forms bursts into depth as well, setting in motion all the succeeding layers of trees and golden foliage, whose movements re-engage those of the foreground trees at a still higher and more complex level of activity, giving us a fresh revelation of the inner life of the grove. The golden backdrop swings from right to left, balancing the march of the foreground trees, and rising in pitch as it moves. Its chromatic intensity crescendos in the upper left corner, in a fiery burst which propels the glowing white aspens toward the right.

 

Observe how the brightest area of gold occupies a rectangular interval bounded by the left edge of the picture and the first aspen. Here, the yellow is brighter than the cool white of the tree, and the expanding pressure of this force of yellow is felt in the displacement, the movement in time and space, to the second aspen. But notice also that the bright rectangle sits atop a distinctly tall rectangle of dark shadow, largely held in place by the first aspen but seeping behind it and falling diagonally to the base of the second tree, whence the thinner shapes of more distant trees spring up in a parallel diagonal toward the top of the first tree, punctuating the second interval.

 

The third interval, that between the second and third foreground trees, stands in pronounced contrast to the prior interval. A bracing chord is established by three solemn, cool gray vertical notes, the rising forms of the middle-ground aspens, contrasting with the diagonals of the previous interval, providing a vigorously felt pull upward as well as forward. A dynamic tension is created between this upward thrust and the downbeat which ensues: the golden foliage which shimmers down throughout the second interval reappears condensed as the flamelike burst of bright leaves near the bottom of the third. Set off by a dark note nudged behind it to its left, this vibrant yellow holds an oblique relationship with the gold at the upper left corner of the picture, as though it had swung down from there, into the picture and forward to the viewer. In the next and widest interval between foreground trees, a similar flame leaps before a dense sylvan colonnade.

The alacrity of this movement, culminating in serene joy, is magnified by the gentle outward fanning of the backdrop of trees, and by the slight bending, as in reaction to the expanding pressure within this central interval, of the foreground tree which bounds it on the right.

 

A third flare of foreground foliage, somewhat lower in tone, touches down softly near the lower right corner of the picture. Above it, the dark, narrow shapes of distant trees lean to the right, balancing the opposite inclination of trees on the left side of the picture, and pulling the pictorial space up and back near the right corner, establishing an area of deepest recession. In reference to this depth, the pictorial space can be experienced as coming forward as it swings all the way to the left and then around in front to the right foreground. As in a canvas by Cézanne or Mondrian, an astounding plenitude of qualitative space, charged with feeling, plays out its drama between the front and back planes. In this drama the players are all the silvery tree trunks and their black branches. Caught in the midst of a space that revolves counterclockwise-enmeshed, that is, in the relativity of space/time-these trees adjust their positions so that the near trunks move to the right while the far ones move to the left. The center of the pictorial space is thus shifted: while the central interval between foreground trees shows no appreciable depth —the brilliant shape of foliage we spoke of earlier leaps in front of a gathering of trees that form a background screen— the views in the intervals to left and right show a well-regulated perspective moving back from right to left, suggesting a vantage point just left of center for the observer, or—which is the same thing-implying that the foreground plane of aspen trees is moving to the right. It is remarkable how each of the intervals framed by foreground trees is distinct from all the others, as regards the color, size, and activity of the contained elements. Yet, at the same time, the distinct areas do not separate from the whole. They are all interlinked in a complex orchestration, which we have indicated to a certain extent, but which richly transcends the descriptive power of words, and whose depth and fullness the reader will experience, with renewed freshness and endless variations, at each viewing of this masterpiece.

 

This work, like all of Christopher's photographs, is able to act across distance, to illumine a viewer standing fifty or a hundred feet away, to transcend the physical dimensions of its frame. This quality makes a picture immediately recognizable as being from Christopher's hand, even when an image never before seen is glimpsed from across a large room. This expansiveness, this radiance, was called claritas by the medieval philosophers. It is the hallmark of beauty. This clarity is not a function of bright colors or sharp details. One can easily find photographs or paintings which have brighter hues and, at times, sharper details but which lack clarity-which have little presence, appearing confused and muddled even from a short distance, collapsing in on themselves instead of expanding. Clarity is a radiant intelligibility resulting from a plenitude of form, of organic order and vital energy. Paucity of form results in lack of clarity, no matter how bright or sharply focused the image may be.

 

Through its clarity, its expansiveness, Christopher's photographic art reveals the splendor, the superabundance of being, the mysterious gushing forth of the act of existing. Existence is an act. The very word exist is a verb; be-ing describes an action.

Nature is alive, she acts-and these photographs act by virtue of their form, the disposition of their colors, shapes and lines.

 

All the constituents of a Christopher Burkett work enjoy a communal life. They interact freely, spontaneously; nothing is forced or arbitrary. A masterpiece differs from an inferior work precisely in this quality of freedom. An inferior photograph appears either fortuitous, as if all the colors and shapes just happened to be there, having no inner reason, or else forced or staged, as if the photographer imposed his will upon the things in his picture, from outside, as one might build a machine. A great work of art is not mechanical but organic, as nature herself is organic, having an inner life from which its movements proceed. An organism does not merely move, like a machine. An organism acts.

 

In Christopher's photographs, as in beautiful music or dance, everything occurs at the right time and in the right place, takes its ordained place in the sequence of spatial movements, so that the whole unfolds rhythmically, organically, as a unified life. When a work has formal integrity, it unfolds organically within itself, and this unfolding within the work is continuous with an unfolding of the work toward the viewer-the clarity which we spoke of earlier.

 

Christopher does not rely on linear or atmospheric perspectival illusions to provide space in his pictures. Rather, like the masters of traditional representational painting, he establishes space by pure pictorial means: the forces inherent in the shapes and colors of each composition push and pull against one another and against the surface of the picture, and the kinetically felt tensions among these elements give us a dynamic feeling of space while at the same time giving rise to what painters call the "picture plane" — the mysterious field of force which exists when all the relations of form in a picture establish together a unified, integral, pulsating space which always faces the viewer and never drops away to leave "holes" or gaps. Because Christopher never relies on illustrative conventions or formulas, but always discovers the inherent space as it unfolds in and from his particular motif, his pictorial space is always fresh and unique to the particular image.

 

Floating Leaves on River, New Jersey, 1989 gives us a layering of two very different spatial experiences which wonderfully, without losing their disparity, unite in a sort of concordant discord. An especially poignant beauty arises from the union in the picture plane, and hence in the viewer's consciousness, of disparate worlds: the topsy-turvy realm of trees reflected in the river, and the multitude of leaves moving across the water's surface. We do not see the land itself, the "real" quotidian world with its upright trees; we only see the upside-down reflected world. (Perhaps we may recognize, in this watery reverse world with its grey, indistinct and limitless depths, an image of a certain inward-looking state of consciousness.) The image which takes shape in this depth is parallel to the picture plane. Across the surface of this depth and, therefore, by implication, perpendicular to the picture plane, float the myriad leaves, the near ones appearing large and the far ones, at the top of the picture, appearing small.

Now this effect of perspective is negated by three phenomena: the leaves lie across the whole surface of the picture-even as, in a contrary dimension, they lie across the whole surface of the river; the absence of any riverbanks in our view; and the way that leaves and reflections alike dissolve into flickering, richly textured touches of silver, russet and gold. The movement of the leaves is suggested by the dynamic activity of the whole composition. Notice how the leaves do not randomly scatter, but aggregate in a certain pattern as if in accordance with some governing spirit or breath of wind. They form lines which pull away from the upper right corner, downward to the left where they conglomerate and press forward; then they move across in front until an especially distinct bunch of dark, reflected tree trunks pushes them up toward the right-hand corner again. In this last move we see how closely the two different spatial layers of this picture interact. Yet a further, surprising event occurs in this picture. The last rays of the setting sun skim across the surface of the river, a sheer grace kindling and transforming the passing leaves and bringing a promise of joy even to the still grey watery depths.

 

In Luxuriant Red Maple, Kentucky, 1996 a very different kind of space occurs. Aggregates of scarlet leaves, broken with yellow, explode against a deep green backdrop varied with violet-red touches, taking command of most of the pictorial field. Down below, a narrow horizontal strip of light green grass both pushes up, as a shape of color, against the red leaves, and slices back into space, passing under the red foliage and then the green foliage. Just to the left of the great maple's trunk, the green grass rises in pitch to a pale yellow green. This tone presses directly up against a dark mass of purple-brown branch and deep green foliage, but at the same time it creates a passage swinging our eye to the right and upward into an aggregate of brilliant red leaves. Both these activities of this area of bright yellow-green lock it into a foreground plane. Towards the right of the picture, however, the horizontal strip of green darkens to blend into the dark green of the background foliage, even submerging some darker red foreground leaves into the passage, thus linking all the planes into a spatial transition linking near and far, which gives our eye a sensation of moving back into distance. In the opposite, upper left corner, a piece of light sky visible above the red tree answers to the recession in the lower right corner by bringing our eye around to the front again, through the contrast of this light sky with the foliage. This gives us a sensation of space wrapping around behind the scene in a counterclockwise manner and rejoining the picture plane to provide an all-embracing, dynamic spatial unity.

 

It is worth noting that while there is no apparent external source of light in this picture (nor in many of Burkett's other pictures), the illumination being very diffuse, the whole picture radiates light. True pictorial light is never merely the imitation of an effect of illumination (though it may contain such an effect). It is always a luminescence from within the pictorial form, a radiance born of the harmonic encounter of rhythmically related shapes of precisely tuned colors. As in music, the intervals among tones are all important, establishing the placement of contrasts and passages and the specific vibration which occurs between one color and another. In the present instance, one can feel the harmonic move from light green to dark green to brilliant red as a movement in space and time.

 

In most of Christopher Burkett's work, the subject is incidental. What matters is the vitality of the form. The compelling feeling of reality, the testimony of truthfulness to nature, is due to the integrity and energy of form. Form is a primary principle of nature. Every material thing is constituted of at least these two principles: form and matter. No material thing exists without form. Form determines the essence or nature of a thing; and at the same time it is through its form that a thing receives existence, because existence is always that of some actually existing thing, and a thing is what it is by virtue of its form. Form is what causes a thing to be, to be what it is, and to be beautiful, which is to say "full of form," for beauty is the splendor of being. The Latin word formosus means both "full of form" and "beautiful." The paradox of all great art holds true in the work of Christopher Burkett: it is the form, the "abstract" virtue of the work-the rhythmic relations of lines, shapes and colors, the dynamic tension between the two-dimensional plane and the pushing and pulling color shapes, which makes each picture so real, so true to nature. The picture acts in accordance with nature's inner life. This is why, as is so often remarked, Christopher's photographs look more like paintings than like typical nature photos. A more "literal" or "matter of fact" recording of superficial appearances, a

"photo-realist" image, would be less true to nature, would fail to express the act of existence, and would therefore lack the plenitude, the splendor of being which we experience as beauty.

 

In Green Veratrum, Alaska, 1993 curling leaf forms spring forth like flames and swirl about in clear, modulated tints of blue-green, yellow-green and cool and warm white, filling the whole pictorial field. Here the representational aspect, the recognizability of objects, is reduced to such an extent that we are not immediately conscious of looking at plants; rather we seem to directly gaze upon the inner flame of things, the fire of divine energy coursing through the cosmos and giving life to every being from within. Each leaf has its own life, but in harmony with all the other leaves, and in dependence on the one life which they all share. Individual leaves and clusters of leaves curve out and in, rhythmically, coming forth and returning in perpetual movement, an image of the systole and diastole of the spiritual heart of creation.

 

Green Veratrum is expansive. The splendor of being radiates from the photograph as a whole and from each of its parts. Every form, every detail, exists from the inside out. We feel the creative energy in nature which holds things in being from within, the pulse of existence. Nothing in the picture looks as if it were the result of outer, mechanical forces or of arbitrary chance; every object exists spontaneously, freely, having its vital principle and raison d'etre within. Each form is ceaselessly renewed from within by virtue of the rhythm of its contours, the pressure of its tone against those contours, and the precise registering of tonal relations inside and outside the form.

 

Such rightness of form results from the immense labor of love which Christopher lavishes upon the work, adjusting every nuance of light, every subtlety of chromatic pitch. Someone who is ignorant of the plenitude of being in nature on the one hand, and of the requirements of artistic representation on the other hand, might think that all this work that goes into a photograph, work which is comparable to that of a painter, could constitute a subjective distortion of nature's appearance, a deviation from the "objective" snapshot. But as Cézanne said, "nature is more in depth than in surface." To represent her truly requires a metaphysical penetration through appearances to the mystery which underlies them. Artistic creation is precisely the process in which a person whose mind and heart are fertilized by contact with the mystery gives birth to new forms which embody and reveal some aspect of that mystery. A beautiful work of art is a draft from the infinite wellspring of being which no artist can begin to exhaust.

 

We have thirsted for the beauty of nature, with a thirst that can only be satisfied by intimate communion with the life that fills her. How elusive such communion is in our day! How many paintings and photographs we have seen which, instead of bringing us into communion, close us off by presenting an opaque veneer of appearances! But now we turn, full of wonder, to an art born of communion. Ever new, ever fresh and alive, ever varied with the manifold splendor of nature, the photography of Christopher Burkett comes to us as a grace. We receive this art with gratitude and joy.