Color Me Bow-Wow
The Art of Ron Burnsby Scott Rose
Newman's Big Adventure© Ron Burns
Soulfully, a dachshund looks up from a composition of twisting vines and swallows in flight. Labradors, a Chihuahua and a German shepherd drive premium automobiles up New York City's Madison Avenue, manifesting the immense elation of the first National Dog Day Parade. Comfy in an armchair beside a table beautified by flowers, a bulldog cocks his head for maximum "Don't-you-just-wanna-scratch-behind-my-ears?" effect. Welcome to the alluring, canine-centric world of artist Ron Burns.
If the subjects of Ron's works are most often pooches, the expressive focus of his paintings is the boundless joy dogs bring into our lives. In Newman's Big Adventure, a dog's head and forepaws are propped over the opened window on the driver's side of a pickup truck. His outsized wet nose and panting tongue express his anticipation of sheer adventure in the impending ride, while his plaintive eyes project a message; "C'mon already; I'm waiting for you!" Beyond the generally upbeat color schemes and the joie de vivre visible in his canvasses, Ron Burns' paintings enjoy widespread popularity because in them, he captures very particular emotional moments of the richly-varied human-dog relationship, emotional moments as familiar as they are cherishable.
Ron sketches out a portrait and then starts application of acrylic paints to depict the subject dog's eyes. "The pet comes to me through those eyes," he says. With our eyes, meanwhile, we see that Ron sometimes injects wry humor into the way an animal companion comes to him through its peepers. Static Cat depicts a dog in an armchair with, on a T.V. screen atop a stand beside him, a slightly distressed but surly looking feline's intrusive head. Behind the cat on the TV are jagged waves indicating static, visually echoed in the background of the composition to the dog's right. Symbolized in this painting is a dog's sense of dread competition for his humans' affections in the presence of a family cat. The dog has a smiley attitude, as though confident he'll get all the love he wants; but the visible static in the painting stands for the friction and conflict between the touch of anxiety the dog is in reality sensing, and the cat's secretly-jealous-of-the-dog-but-too-proud-to-admit-it karma. Lighthearted animal-related poignancy, indeed, is a hallmark of Ron Burns' art.
Life's A Vacation© Ron Burns
While his paintings often incorporate stylistic features and legerdemain discernibly absorbed from Andy Warhol and Henri Matisse, Burns is distinguished in vibrantly representing the emotional lives of animal companions. Each Burns' dog portrait is really only complete when a person is looking at it and being reminded of similar emotional moments shared with a dog. Forbes magazine said that "Burns' style has become extremely collectible," and to be sure, some celebrated personages (among them Joan Rivers, Brian Boitano and The Princess of Monaco) have lent additional cachet and hence economic value to his works by buying them. Yet Burns' considerable achievement is not the forging of an entirely new technique of painting but rather, within the context of very-well-executed existing techniques, making a fresh and perhaps a unique appeal to dog and animal lovers.
Warhol himself said "I never met a pet I didn't like." Warhol was, furthermore, painted, by Jamie Wyeth, with a dachshund resting upon his hands. And his output of animal paintings was sufficient to a recent special exhibition at The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh; Canis Major; Warhol's Dogs and Cats (and other party animals). Warhol's canine paintings, such as Portrait of Maurice, have in common with many Ron Burns' works the dog as the central subject portrayed, as well as an unconventional use of color. In Portrait of Maurice, though, Warhol's nuanced uses of violet-blue, mauve and orange call attention to themselves for their painterliness, while the dog with his neutral expression seems but a prop for the painterly display. By contrast, a Ron Burns dog painting exhibits less esoteric uses of unconventional colors, yet the colors used are employed to more fully and expressively convey a dog's personality.
Soupçons of Matisse are unmistakable in Ron Burns' paintings. In Burns' Life's a Vacation, even the single, marigold-hued flower towering over the dog against the two-tones-of-blue background evokes aspects of Matisse's work. Yet if you consider it next to, let's say, Matisse's own Interior With Dog of 1934, in which the dog is a neutral, passive element subsumed into the domestic interior, you verify that Burns adopts styles of painting not for their own sake but, rather, the better to portray an individual dog's essence.
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Which gets to the heart, really, of why Ron Burns does what he does. After studying visual communications, he was successful as a corporate designer, but found the milieu confining. So as a creative escape, he started painting animals he saw in shelters. His artistic talents combined with his enchanting knack for capturing dogs' individual qualities in paintings were recognized. And if anything, his artistic success, by empowering him to speak up for abused animals, redoubled his resolve to do so. His artistic production, tons of fun to look at, reflects his genuine, profound love for dogs and commitment to help them. If you don't live near galleries showing his work, you could purchase his delightful book The Dogs of Ron Burns. Ron has been active as an advocate for search and rescue pooches, as well as for dogs subjected to the unspeakable cruelty of dog fighting. The more you peruse his resume, the more you realize that his heart is sincerely engaged in making the world a better place for canines.
The great actress Elizabeth Taylor is a kindred spirit, often involved in charitable efforts; she commissioned Ron Burns to portray her Maltese Sugar. In the portrait, Sugar is as good as enthroned in a Louis Vuitton carrying bag, looking supremely self-assured in her power to get humans to pamper her. Against a black backdrop, the roseate-peach highlights in her ears are balanced by the white and roseate-peach accents in a flower to the right behind her. Miss Taylor and Ron Burns agreed to create twelve limited editions of this painting in giclée, to be sold to support the Whispering Hope Ranch. Several of the giclées remain available as of this writing.
Sugar© Ron Burns
Yet you need not be Elizabeth Taylor to commission a work from Ron Burns (though having her pocketbook helps - commission prices start at $30,000). His website (www.ronburns.com) has a contact page devoted to beginning the commission process. Make'n a Splash, a commissioned painting, is pure Ron Burns' magic. Under a cerulean sky, two Goldens indulge in la dolce vita in an outdoor swimming pool in Colorado. One is lazing on his back atop a floating toy, his tongue out, a drink in his paw; the other, caught in mid-air, has just taken a flying leap off a diving board. These are, and are not, anthropomorphizations. You will never literally see a dog holding a mixed drink topped by a little paper umbrella in his paw, nor will you ever see a dog suspended yards high above the level of a diving board. Yet if you've ever spent time with Golden Retrievers near water, you will immediately recognize as 100% true-to-doggy-life the exuberant, playful spirits exhibited by the dogs portrayed in Make'n a Splash.
The same human warmth that led to Ron Burns being named artist-in-residence of The Humane Society of The United States informs all of his work. Mama Moo is a portrait of a cow, not shown imperviously grazing on a Dutch meadow but rather gazing up with eyes that look directly at the viewer, no matter the viewer's placement vis-à-vis the painting. Take a second look at this cow portrait, and you'll see that the cow's shadow in the grass is in the shape of a horse, and that the outline of the horse shadow blends seamlessly with the outline of the cow's backside. It's witty; it's aesthetically delightful; it's Ron Burns. In closing, I'll mention one of my favorite Burns' paintings, the ironically-titled If You Want Me... I'll Be in the Kitchen. Peering up from a kitchen floor in front of a half-way-closed door is a doleful hound. You can't tell if the door is about to be closed, or opened, but you sure can tell that the dog wants to end up on the same side as the person. The keyhole in the doorknob is, of course, bone-shaped. But the key to truly understanding the painting is, as always with Ron Burns, in the dog's eyes.
