The sensuous, densely layered paintings Bob Burdette is showing at Ann Nathan this month combine text and image in a way that recalls Rauschenberg and Warhol, both of whom he considers influences. But the actual text and actual images come from a place very particular to Burdette’s personal history, namely some 50 boxes of books, magazines, and comics that he started collecting as a child in rural West Virginia.
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Burdette grew up in the 70s and early 80s on 35 wooded acres. Though his family had a small black-and-white TV, it sat atop a color set that didn’t work, and he spent lots of time outdoors. He and his brother and cousins read comics, set up battle tableaux with action figures, and dressed in camouflage to play war games. His father was an amateur military historian who painted historical scenes, so there were always art supplies around. When Burdette entered his teens, he says, his parents became very protective, keeping him close to home. “I wonder every day what their reason was.” But he believes their restrictions, which made him feel he was missing out on the larger world, are part of the reason he began to collect a lot of imagery: “I lived in books and comics. I was real big into encyclopedias–there was so much in them, places and famous people.”
A year ago Burdette and his wife had a daughter, and concern for her has surfaced in his most recent paintings, a number of which hint at sexual threats to girls or young women. In some of these works he was also inspired by what he calls the “psychotic quality” of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Three titled Brave New World all show a frightened-looking Little Red Riding Hood, and in two of them a bikini-clad woman is superimposed on the little girl. In Sea Creatures, a woman from a Japanese print is threatened by octopus tentacles. But the meaning isn’t precisely fixed, just as Burdette throughout his work is ambivalent about advertising: “I wanted to make something out of advertisements that’s beautiful too,” he says.
