Inspired by the layering of light, pattern, texture, and color, Jean Burdick seeks to capture the fragility of nature in a changing environment through her prints and paintings. In her work, she builds layers of pattern, texture, shape and color starting with silkscreen printing using her own landscape photographs referencing both organic and man-made structures.
Silkscreen printmaking is an art technique where ink is forced through stencil onto paper using a squeegee using an original image. Burdick then enhances her images by drawing, painting, and experimenting with mark-making techniques where each successive layer magnifies, overlaps, obscures or otherwise enhances the layer that came before it. In her words, “the resulting images suggest narratives of unfolding life cycles: birth, growth, death and renewal. These vistas, both rural and urban, are composites of landscapes producing a memoir of places in transition.”
Jean Burdick is a painter and printmaker and lives and maintains a studio in Bucks County, PA. Burdick received her MFA degree from The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA, and her BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, and has worked as a textile designer and an arts educator. She is the recipient of awards and honors including a Visual Artist Residency to the Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada; Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Visual Artist/Educator Fellowship Grant; Artist in Residence, Central Bucks School District and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant as an Artist in Residence for the James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA. She has exhibited nationally and is included in numerous corporate, public and private collections.
Burdick’s work Mirror Lake Road, represents in her words, “when the seasons changed last year in the fall and winter months, bringing darker days and colder temperatures, I reminisced about my memories of hiking in the spring and summer. Referencing the natural world, my print, Mirror Lake Road, suggests a narrative of the annual unfolding life cycles: birth, growth, death and regeneration.”
Referencing images of her photographs from a trip to New Orleans, Facades IV, Burdick created photo silkscreens of architectural elements from various houses and buildings. When printing the screens, she collaged the images and later enhanced them with drawn and painted elements. Burdick says, “I am particularly drawn to doorways and windows, which represent the interface between the structures and the lives of those who inhabit them.”
