Lynn Burnes Art

Many years ago, a series of arcs unsuspectingly emerged in my paintings as elemental forces, or patterns, within the compositions. They reappeared as doors, openings, caves, portals, gaps, holes, and even vortexes. They demanded to be noticed. Since then, I have learned these are universal archetypes which in fact occur in many styles of art, including paintings.

I believe that our minds work as complex data and image processors, with our senses taking in scores of data daily from all that is around us.  Our eyes send constant images to the brain which then stores them, depending on their importance to us.  (And, as we know, some images can never be erased.) The images we allow into our minds may come out later in another recombined form, such as in art.

 We are all part of an enormous universe that is greater than anything we can comprehend.  Many of us have asked ourselves at one time or another, “What is my place in the universe?  Why am I placed now on this tiny spinning planet?”

 In exploring these questions and themes about the universe, I came to realize that even the cosmos sometimes emerges in my paintings.  I love the photos taken by the James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes —faraway galaxies, countless stars, expanding solar systems, multi-colored nebulae, immense planets, and pitted moons. The paintings then become a reformulation or a generation of new images within oneself. Sometimes even universal archetypes emerge.

The eminent professor of mythology, Joseph Campbell, said that “Art is a ritual that pitches you out of life on the visible plane.”  It becomes the mythologization of the environment and the worlds.  Perhaps when we are open to the songs of the universe we might see the essential order of things.  Perhaps art records this act of universal creation over and over again.

 This thought inspires me --

     Every person is more than just [themself], each represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.  That is why every person’s story is important, eternal, sacred….

                                                                                                                     Herman Hesse, Demian