John Burton | Shape Maker

Aspiring to visual poetry, painter John Burton redefined his artistic approach.

By Gussie Fauntleroy

John Burton was already experiencing a major transition in his painting when a series of long conversations with a good friend and fellow artist spawned a sudden and significant shift in his way of seeing art. The award-winning landscape painter worked in oils for many years before turning to gouache and digital art about 10 years ago. As he and his friend pondered the definition of fine art, Burton was struck with a realization: “Whatever the subject, a steel mill or a field of flowers, what I enjoy most with visual art is the shape distribution,” he says. “With this self-discovery I decided to call myself a shape maker.”

For the Monterey, California-based artist, this means that his imagery begins with the placement of shapes to produce compelling abstract forms, even though the result is representational. It happens mainly through value changes, or the contrast between areas of light and dark, as well as the temperature of colors and the sizes of shapes. His aim is a deeply satisfying artwork whose shapes “help the eye move or dance around the image,” he says. As an artist who loves the natural world, he describes his broader goal in painting as “a celebration of internalizing beauty and then conveying how I felt about it, in a poetic way.”

The beauty of the ocean and mountains was an integral part of Burton’s boyhood in the San Francisco Bay Area, although he also focused almost equally on sports and art—“I knew I wanted to play in the NBA or be an artist,” he shares. His parents encouraged their son’s love of art, while his father, a rocket scientist, helped open his eyes to uncommon ways of thinking about the world. When Burton was about 12, his father gave him a book that pointed to apparent correlations between major movements in science and art. For example, Einstein’s theory of relativity posited that if one were to move at the speed of light, there would be no time, and all sides of an object would be visible at once. Meanwhile, Picasso was creating paintings in which multiple perspectives on a face were visible at once. “Some of it is a bit of a stretch,” Burton explains of the book’s ideas. “But I definitely feel there’s an artistic aspect to physics, and people don’t appreciate enough the mathematics that goes into art.”

Following high school, Burton studied business marketing at Arizona State University and then returned to Northern California, where he graduated from the Academy of Art University with a fine arts degree. Having absorbed his father’s strong work ethic, he was further convinced of the value of hard work by witnessing the results of enormous effort in the then-booming dot-com world. “At art school it was the norm to work late into the night, completely devoted to whatever we were working on,” he says. The region now known as Silicon Valley was “a place where you felt things could happen, where we were seeing hope become manifest through labor.”

Burton took this attitude with him when he moved back to Arizona and began painting the desert. After focusing on the figure in art school, turning to the landscape was his first important artistic shift, driven largely by the challenges of finding consistent models for painting from life. “A mountain never showed up late, the ocean never left early and a tree never had a headache,” he quips. He quotes a line from a poem by his great-grandfather: “When destiny is losing, she cheats.” Meaning that fate helped guide him to this new path.

Yet, painting the desert was anything but easy. Burton describes his experience of rendering the arid environment’s delicate vegetation as “like trying to paint smoke.” The virtual absence of strong contrasts in both value and color temperature also pushed him to extremes of effort in honing his skills. Although he loved living in the Arizona desert, he eventually returned to California and settled in Monterey. There, in a landscape that more easily offered itself to his brush, where “the white of crashing waves against dark rocks was so much easier to discern,” the energy spent refining the craft of painting paid off. He was ready to elevate his career to the high standards of what he considers fine art.

Burton’s paintings found their way into museum exhibitions, galleries and private collections. Then in 2016, while preparing for a museum show and delving with an artist friend into ideas about painting, he became aware of shape making as the primary driver in his art. He began exploring the use of gouache, an opaque water-based medium that provided new approaches to creating interesting shapes. Yet the medium offers its own set of technical challenges. As Burton puts it, “I have my opinion and gouache has its opinion and we meet somewhere in the middle. With oils you can beat it into submission, but at some point, gouache doesn’t let you go any further.”

Soon his focus on shape distribution led him into digital art, where an even greater facility for producing shapes revealed itself. He began meeting and developing friendships with artists in the film industry, with mutual admiration for each other’s work. Friends involved with Avatar and Star Wars and with studios including DreamWorks eventually were instrumental in helping him develop his digital skills and move into the film world.

Today Burton’s creativity takes two forms, plein air landscapes in gouache and concept art for films. Landscape painting takes him to the kinds of places where he loves to spend time, especially mountains and the nearby rocky coast. SIERRA, painted in the Eastern Sierra near June Lake, reflects his practice of finding shapes and abstracting what he sees. As with all his plein air work, it was begun and completed on site. Viewed close up, the painting appears as light and dark forms that guide the eye around the piece. From farther away, it resolves into snow-patched mountains, rocks and trees. “The landscape itself is the launching pad. It’s my inspiration to paint a poem,” he says.

Concept art, Burton’s other area of focus, begins with an assignment from a director or artistic team, either for a live-action or animated film. The director has a concept, and without producing an expensive physical set, needs to visualize a moment in the film. The artist receives a “brief” that describes the scene, and a short turnaround time to visualize it through digital art. “You’re the eyes for the director,” he says. In contrast with painting nature, concept art involves evoking “something no one has ever seen before.”

Part of what allows Burton to successfully create such scenes is his vast store of experience and knowledge from painting the landscape. He draws on decades of studying light and its effects on the natural world in various atmospheric conditions and the ways abstracted shapes can suggest landforms and other objects. In the digital piece DISCOVERY, not produced for a film, Burton places a human figure and enormous polar bear in the foreground, both gazing over an ice floe-studded body of water at what could be a futuristic military intelligence gathering facility. Intentionally, the artist leaves the interpretation up to the viewer. But his aim is always to tell a story. Even when painting a seemingly straightforward seascape on the Monterey coast, he says, “I’m picturing in my mind the next pirate ship about to come into the scene.”

For Burton, gouache and digital art influence and inspire each other. In his hands, both are very direct mediums in which brushstrokes, either physical or digital, are like drawing with paint. His goal is for the brushstrokes’ immediacy to produce engaging, calligraphic shapes that shift between thinner and thicker, “almost with the feel of an alphabet,” he says. He works quickly, both on location with paint and in creating concept art. But each piece is built on decades of effort and contains the intention of always continuing to improve. As he puts it, “There’s a lifelong development in being a poetic storyteller creating interesting shapes.”

Colorado-based Gussie Fauntleroy writes for a variety of art publications and is the author of three books on visual artists. Learn more at gussiefauntleroy.com.

contact information
burtonartstudio.com

representation
Bonner David Galleries, Scottsdale, AZ, bonnerdavid.com

This story appeared in the April/May 2024 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.