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Nancy Dodds Gallery 7th and San Carlos P.O. Box 6016 Carmel, CA 93921 831-624-0346 ndg@nancydoddsgallery.com |
Jane Mason Burke It was only the third etching she had ever done, but everyone wanted one - rendering of the soft, warm, fuzzy creatures that had been missing in her childhood, but had begun to populate the nursery of her son, Traford. Dressing each in baby clothes, she assembled the winsome group to model for "Family Portrait... T. Bear." Nearly 20 years later, those bears have become her signature in an internationally renowned collection of favorite animals, anthropomorphized at picnics and tea parties, ballet bears and laundry lines, settings curiously more appropriate for her furry friends than their human inspiration. Jane Mason Burke was born an artist, but she wasn't entirely sure she would become one. While she was still a little girl, her two older brothers pursued their own artistry with just enough struggle to convince her businessman father that his third child must invest in a college career that would provide for a fruitful and meaningful life. "It wasn't until my father was dying," she said, "this invincible Spencer Tracy of a man who had been successful in a myriad business ventures - that he confessed is lifelong dream to become an artist himself. Here were all these architectural renderings by someone who couldn't let himself go through with it. It struck me as sad that he not only sacrificed his own talent, but that he passed his struggle on to his children." As if we had the power to curtail the creative spirit of another. In elementary school, Burke's drawings were singled out as the featured decor in the principal's office. Her fourth grade teacher, Maide Angel Wilson - a peculiar woman with ruby-stained cheeks and lips whose color bled well past the lines of her mouth - awarded the child who could render the best likeness of her dog with the honor of walking it at recess. Burke hated the job, saw nothing glorious about the prize, but felt validated in her artistic talent. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, she honored her father with a bachelor's degree in history and political science, followed by a secondary teaching credential, but she took every art class that would fit into her schedule - audited, so they wouldn't appear on her school record. Upon graduation, she taught high school for three years. "There was something about etching," she said, "that felt like it was meant to be. It is such an amazing process, extremely painstaking, exacting - and rewarding." In etching, Burke coats a copper plate with "ground," a wax layer into which she draws her images with a needlelike instrument or a pencil, not unlike the work on a Russian Easter egg. She then puts the plate into acid, which eats into the copper where she has drawn into the wax. The resulting effect depends upon the boldness and frequency of stroke, as well as the number of acid applications. Burke usually applies the acid between 60 and 100 times. The next step in the process involves cleaning off the plate, then rubbing ink into the copper relief before pressing it into dampened fine French paper. Burke's first significant assignment was to photograph something she loved, then make a drawing of it, from which she would create an etching. It was then that she captured the life of her infant son's teddy bears. "It was amazing to me," she said, "that I received such an instantaneous flow of affection for this piece. But I have learned to anticipate that reaction when I create something special that I want for myself. I have had to resist the ideas of others about what I should be doing. They ask why I don't do mice. I don't see the beauty in mice that I do in bears, otters or rabbits. I love teddies anyway; I've been collecting them for years. Even then, there has to be something very special about them. They can't be too cutsie or too mean. Each has to be a bear that speaks to me." (Excerpt from the Monterey Herald Gallery Magazine, Sunday, April 6, 1997)
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The Nancy Dodds Gallery
