Artist sees inspiration in environmental decline

Edward Burke sees beauty in a plastic cake box.

Maybe beauty isn’t the right word. The 74-year-old artist recently started working on a series of paintings of the pastry containers, after being struck by the tremendous waste they represent.

“Even if you get just a little slice of cake, they give it to you in this big plastic box,” says Burke, who moved to Bethel about two years ago from Fishkill, N.Y.

It worries him, he says. More than ever, he thinks about how human consumption is affecting the world around us — choking the oceans with plastic, endangering the bee population and generally harming the planet. It scares him, but he’s also inspired by it.

Burke has been both a painter and graphic designer for decades, and, for the past decade or so, his exclusive topic has been the environment.

Other works include “Plastic Sea,” an abstract painting depicting the pollution of the world’s water with discarded plastic, and a series of “bee boxes,” intended to illustrate, among other things, how rising carbon dioxide levels affect bee populations. It’s not his intention to preach — in fact, Burke knows he’s as guilty of pollution as anyone else.

“I’m not trying to hit anyone over the head with this,” he says. But he is trying to make people aware of what he sees as a mounting crisis.

Burke’s career in the arts began when he was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y., when a sharp-eyed teacher recognized his gifts and enlisted him to make elaborate chalk illustrations on the billboard for school events. She’s also the one who suggested he apply to the High School of Art & Design in Manhattan.

He applied to the school, was accepted and basically never looked back. “I really don’t know if I could have done anything else,” Burke says of painting. “It’s been my entire life.”

After graduating high school in 1964, he went on to study at the School of Visual Arts in New York, while supporting himself as a full-time commercial artist, providing content for advertising agencies around the city. For years, Burke made a living as a graphic designer and illustrator, while also pursuing the fine arts.

Burke says he’s since retired as a commercial artist, but intends to create and exhibit his artwork for as long as possible, and has a show scheduled from July 11 to Aug. 30 at the Ridgefield Library. He’s primarily a painter, though he has dabbled in sculpture.

When ask how he’s evolved as an artist, Burke first pointed to his recent pivot to environmental subject matter, from more conventional landscapes, portraits and the like (though many of those were also done in a deconstructed or abstract style).

“They say that, as artists get older, their palate gets more intense,” Burke says. “Mine seems to be going the other way.”

Burke