Painter omits people, uses light evocatively in evening scenes
Fans of the TV series “The Twilight Zone” surely remember the classic episode in which a global calamity renders Burgess Meredith as the last inhabitant on Earth.
“This is solitude,” Meredith says, surveying the depopulated rubble around him. “I’ve never had much solitude.”
A similar sense of eerie emptiness is expressed in a new series of works by a Columbus artist on view at Brandt- Roberts Galleries in the Short North.
“Stillness: Nocturnes by Christopher Burk” presents works in gouache on paper depicting Columbus during the evening hours — at dusk and just after dark.
The mostly urban settings are entirely unremarkable — clapboard houses on street corners and trash bins in parking lots — except that they are void of pedestrians, automobiles and other signs of life.
“The buildings are there; man built the buildings,” Burk said. “Man built all the utilities ... that go around that.”
Yet people are nowhere to be found.
The works’ lack of visible human activity prompts the viewer to ask questions about what led to the vacant scenes: Is everyone indoors, or at a football game? Or, as in “The Twilight Zone,” has a cataclysm suddenly rid the planet of life?
When seeking scenes to paint in areas such as Olde Towne East and Italian Village, Burk chooses locations that others might disregard.
“It’s that idea of taking something that’s not visually desirable or beautiful to somebody,” he said. “It’s the way this light plays upon the top of a garbage bin. There is something beautiful about that, and it is something that is overlooked by many people.”
During evening walks, Burk took photos on his cellphone to use as reference material.
“It’s a matter of just walking around, seeing what catches my eye, the way the light is bouncing off of something,” he said, “and then going back through the images ... and seeing what actually works enough to be turned into a painting.”
But, as in the final works, the artist is careful to omit most signs of human activity from his photos.
“There aren’t any people,” Burk said. “There may be a car somewhere or something like that, and I will leave that out.”
In “Nocturne Duo,” the viewer’s eye is drawn to the narrow alleyway between two buildings; in the distance, a streetlight gleams in the dark- blue sky.
In fact, Burk’s use of light throughout is especially evocative.
In “Alleyway Nocturne I,” an unseen streetlight throws light on the crooked lid of a trash can on the side of a road; and in “Alleyway Nocturne III,” the artist considers a trio of trash cans — one is blue, another is green and tall, and a third is green and squatty. Each is bathed in a dull light that suggests a streetlight in need of maintenance.
Burk is attuned to the derelict details — for example, the tangled wires of telephone poles and the cracked pavement in “Green House Nocturne.”
At times, the exhibit risks overloading the viewer with images of trash cans and dumpsters, but Burk proves equally adept in depicting more picturesque scenes.
“Brick Road Nocturne” presents the crunchy, uneven surface of a brick road, while “Summer Nocturne I” shows a white house at the end of a lonely path. The blue, gray and yellow in the sky suggests twilight, and the porchlight indicates that someone could be — or was recently — home.
Like the exhibit as a whole, the work is at once enigmatic and inviting.