DAVID
BIERK
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David Bierk's paintings explore three distinct areas in depth and intensity:
landscapes, still lifes and what the artist calls "history paintings."
The three paths run parallel interweaving on a regular basis. |
David Bierk,
A EULOGY TO LIFE, RECIPROCITY, TO DE HEEM AND HILL, 1999, oil on canvas,
76 x 112 inches |
David Bierk, A EULOGY TO LIFE, TO VAN OS, 1998, oil on canvas, 49 x 49 inches
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The still lifes are most often flowers, usually based on works by Edouard
Manet and Fantin LaTour, but often include traditional symbols of fruit,
vegetables, goblets, the stuff of voluptuous table coverings. While Bierk
pays homage to masters throughout art history, a signature aspect of his
work, he always paints the image in his own style filled with gusto, bold
strokes and vibrant color. |
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Well-before the movement or term "appropriation" was coined, Bierk
was plumbing the riches of art history for images that suited the direction
of his work. As early as 1969 he painted a self-portrait revisiting Leonardo
daVinci's landscape as a background therefor. The artist's approach to historical
images is not simply curatorial, but conceptual. The work he creates "after"
the masters is never a straight copy, it is always contemporized and re-contextualized
by adding a word with many layers of meaning or framing an "old-master"
looking painting in a steel or rusted-iron surround (a material of contemporary
times with contemporary connotations). Bierk's paintings after the masters
are done in the spirit of praise, celebration, and as an homage to the act
of painting. |
David Bierk,
VERTICAL CLOUD AND RIVER, 2000, oil on board, 24 x 24 inches |
David Bierk, REQUIEM FOR A PLANET, HUDSON RIVER EVENING, 2000,
oil on copper patine, 64 x 88 inches |
He is re-presenting imagery from the past and transforming it through his
hand and mind and eye. His landscapes are invented, never specific places.
They are infused with the ambiance of painters he loves from the 19th century
and before. Among his favorites are Constable, Keith, Inness and Church.
Bierk has traveled far and wide in this country and in Canada, always returning
to home base with photographs of evening skies and cloud-filled vistas.
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Like the 19th century American painters whose reverence for landscape was
made manifest in paint, Bierk paints poetic and romantic landscapes with
layer upon layer of luscious oil paint. It was in his landscapes of the
'80s that the artist's sheer joy in the process of painting came to the
fore. Bierk's history paintings are an on-going dialogue, often diptychs,
sometimes triptychs. The diptychs usually juxtapose a slice of romantic
Bierk landscape on one side with an homage to a master on the other. |
David Bierk,
LAST FLOWER WITH STEEL, TO MANET, 2000, oil on canvas, steel, 31 x 36
inches |
David Bierk, ROSES, LOCKED IN MIGRATION, TO FANTIN-LATOUR, 2000, oil on
canvas, steel, 74 x 62 inches |
At times the
"master" image is a fragment of a still life, at others a figure
or portrait. By creating two sides of equal intensity, the artist has eliminated
the pre-modern concept of central focus and created a duet of focal points.
Each side can or could stand on its own merits, but together the diptychs
pose questions about history, art history, contemporary painting, pictorial
space, paint as subject, frame as window and more. Bierk paints the two
sides of the diptychs in a palette that is harmonious and sustains the moods
in the paints from left to right. It is the joining of color and mood that
makes it all work.
DAVID BIERK's Biography |
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