Tim
Burns

The Painting Process

The Photography Process Tim Burns does not set up his pictures. He looks for the abstractions nature creates on its own and tries to be ready when they appear: trees lit from behind, scenes seen through glass, light reflected from drops of water. For the last 22 years his main tools have been the digital camera and the photo encaustic. Much of the work begins at Duxbury Point in Bolinas, on the West Marin coast. There he waits for the moments when the fog lifts for an instant and the sun spotlights a patch of ocean while birds dive in and around the surface, with only the sound of the reef and the wind around him. He calls these images his daytime dreamscapes, a dance between ocean, fog and light. The same stretch of coast gave rise to his series Land of A Thousand Birds and to the Rothko Seascapes, where sun, sea and sky dissolve into soft bands of color. Tim trusts the moment. His strongest work, he says, comes when he doesn't think about it and lets his creative core take over. He has noticed that the first photo is often the best shot; adjusting with the next frames rarely beats it. The finished image matters to him as an object as much as a picture, which is no surprise from an artist trained in ceramic sculpture. His prints are made on Fuji Crystal Archive paper mounted behind acrylic glass, in sizes such as 16 x 24 and 30 x 45 inches. The acrylic adds depth and luminosity, so the images seem to glow from within. For his Planets series he moved to metal, with large round metal prints in 50-inch and 30-inch diameters. In his photo encaustics, such as Reflections on Water from 2010, he brings photography together with wax. For Tim, making this work brings a sense of healing, pure joy and satisfaction, and that calm is what many people feel in front of it.