‘Sense of Time and Place’
ARTIST GREG BURNS CONTINUES LONG CAREER WITH OKLAHOMA HISTORY CENTER EXHIBIT
Gripping a paintbrush between his teeth, Greg Burns deftly blends watercolors into the color of red brick and begins sweeping color and life into his latest painting.
“All kinds of little things happen, so you need to be available to adjust,” he said, pausing to consider his impeccably detailed drawing of the stately new St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Stillwater. “A lot of this isn’t just doing it over and over again, too. I like to have to come up with different solutions to the same problem, so that every day is just a little different. That’s the cool thing about watercolor … is that it’s always different: the humidity, the air conditioning, everything about it. The paper, these are all handmade papers, so they all take things just a little differently. Nothing is ever exactly alike or like it was, and I like that part of it.
“You know, if you think you’ve learned, you haven’t.”
For the acclaimed Oklahoma City painter, creating art means continually adapting, something he’s become a master at since birth, even when he doesn’t have a pen tucked into his curved right hand or a paintbrush clamped in his mouth.
“I talk to kids’ groups a lot, and I say, ‘Well, if you can’t lift your arms up, how are you going to do this?’ and they all kind of try different kinds of ways: ‘Well, what if I do that?’ You know, I’m still figuring this out. I don’t think I’ve ever figured it out — but it’s figure-outable,” Burns said in a recent interview in his Oklahoma City home studio. “I’ve done a lot of this for a long time, and I guess after a while you become facile at it. It’s like it’s not a big deal. When I think about particular problems in pictures … it’s like all the sudden I can’t get to sleep at night until I finally do think, ‘Oh, I can do that, and that’ll work.’ So, you’re always thinking about how you’re going to approach something. I think art, my field, is kind of a good problemsolving vocation.”
Although he wasn’t born in Oklahoma, Burns, 71, has made his home in the state since he was a youngster seeking treatment
at what was then the Crippled Children’s Hospital. Now, a selection of his paintings is hanging in the Oklahoma History Center through Sept. 29.
Since birth
Burns was born in Fort Worth, Texas, with arthrogryposis multiplex congenita, a muscle and joint disorder that limits or prevents movement of the extremities. His father sold trucks for International Harvester, and Burns said the company helped move the family to Oklahoma City when he was just a toddler so he could receive treatment at what now is The Children’s Hospital at OU Medical Center.
“Now they don’t use the word ‘crippled’ children, you know. We are now persons of disability, with disabilities, or something like that. Which I personally think applies with everybody … to a certain extent. But especially me, I am far from perfect. I mean, I am not symmetrical. I see video of me and pictures, and I’m always startled because that’s not who I feel like inside. And it’s amazing to me. I think, ‘My God, he does that with his teeth and stuff,’ but I do everything with everything,” said Burns, who uses a motorized wheelchair.
“When I drive, in some cars we’ve had I can’t get the transmission selector back in park, and so I get down and move it with my teeth. And I have all kinds of sticks that I use to touch the screen on the dashboard for the navigation and all of that. Whatever it takes.”
When he was growing up, Burns said he often was given pencils and paper and spent hours drawing.
“I always did it. I didn’t think I was gonna do it. I didn’t plan it, I didn’t anticipate it, I didn’t dream about it, I didn’t lust for it, it was something I was already doing,” Burns said earlier this summer before giving a talk at the Oklahoma History Center. “I really drew all the time and not any different than any other kids’ drawings. All children are great artists, they beat Picasso or anybody else, just the sense
of everything that they have in their pictures. I am always amazed at the incredible artwork that children do, and then it takes you a long time to get back there. … And that is one of my big pleasures is speaking to kids and doing demonstrations for children and talking to them about people with disabilities. They ask me every kind of thing in the world, and they’re not afraid.”
In 1964, he won first place in a national art show, a feat that was announced over the loud speakers at Bishop McGuinness High School, and he studied art at the University of Oklahoma. He became a fixture of the fledgling downtown OKC Festival of the Arts for 35 years and earned international acclaim for his intricate ink-and-watercolor paintings. He won a Governor’s Art Award in 1978, the same year he married his wife, Patricia, with whom he raised her three sons and later owned and operated an Oklahoma City art gallery for 20 years.
“It’s enabled me to have a rich life. We’ve been able to be very comfortable and do things we want. I’ve traveled, with Patricia, all over. We’ve spent a lot of time in France and Italy, and we’ve gotten lost in the fog in Venice in a wheelchair that was running out of electric juice and we made it back alive,” he said of his art career. “We’ve been in Kenya and Tanzania, and I’ve been around the Maasai for a while. … I got to go on the USS Oklahoma City, the fast-attack submarine out of Fort Lauderdale, and I think I got to fly the sub.”
The exhibit
Gripping one of his basic Uni-Ball Micro pens between his first two fingers, with his thumb holding the end of the pen against his curved wrist, Burns deftly added a few more tiny details to one of the round windows in his drawing of the St. Francis Xavier Church. Although he uses photographs for reference, he said he doesn’t copy from them.
“I can do this how I want because it’s my picture,” he said. “I do all this freehand.”
Since the ink dries quickly, he said he doesn’t have to worry about smearing it with his curled hand. He learned from a young age to paint with the brush in his mouth because the watercolors don’t dry as quickly.
“Since I first started drawing, my subject matter has been old buildings and old things for some reason. … I find them sort of autobiographical or something almost. They have kind of a life of their own,” Burns said. “While we were driving around in Oklahoma City and seeing these interesting houses that were in disrepair, in bad neighborhoods, especially around University Hospital, when I was a kid, I always thought those things were more interesting.”
He has long shared that fascination with Oklahoma Historical Society Executive Director Bob Blackburn.
“I’ve known him almost 40 years,” Blackburn said. “If you look at it, we were kind of doing the same things: He was capturing the spirit of buildings in his art, and I was trying to capture the stories in the buildings. … He was reading my stuff, I was looking at his pictures, so we naturally came together as friends and have been friends ever since. So, it was time to do this.”
Burns’ Oklahoma History Center exhibit, titled “A Sense of Time and Place,” consists of 10 paintings in the Curator’s Corner of the museum’s second-floor gallery. But Blackburn said he hopes it will be the start of a project to catalog the prolific artist’s work. He encouraged anyone who owns an original Burns painting or drawing to contact the history center and arrange to have it digitally scanned for free.
“We don’t know the extent of his artwork. … The legacy of Greg Burns needs to be preserved — and right now we don’t have enough of his total body of his work,” Blackburn said.
Burns said he plans to donate his artworks and the copyrights on them to the historical society when he and his wife die.
“It’s a great honor to be here, involved in something historical,” Burns said. “If you’ve got talent, if you’ve been given talent and you don’t use it, it doesn’t make any difference. And if you don’t have any talent but you work like crazy, there’s a good chance you’ll get some things done that are really pretty cool. And if you combine the two — working really hard and having a lot of talent — it still doesn’t guarantee success, because it takes pure, blind, dumb luck, as well. You have to be at the right place at the right time, you have to hold your mouth the right way … and I’ve been very lucky.”
We don’t know the extent of his artwork. … The legacy of Greg Burns needs to be preserved — and right now we don’t have enough of his total body of his work.” – OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR BOB BLACKBURN