Artist, Joe Burns, who has previously exhibited at the prestigious National Arts Club, will be showing his work at the Manhattan Art & Antiques Center through the month of October. In Burns’ rich, moody work, thoughtful subjects are lost in their inner realities, confronting life’s big questions. In the provocative “Finding a Boy,” Burns depicts “the dichotomy we all have of flesh and the spirit.” The show will be on view Oct. 3 – Oct. 30; 10:30 AM – 6 PM Mon-Sat/12 – 6 PM Sun in Gallery #30 on the Main Floor.
For Burns, it has been a long road to his art. “I was raised by Catholic charities,” Burns says. “I sort of drifted all my life–all my younger life, that is…and then I got a degree in painting.” His troubled childhood seems to have given him a compassionate eye for his subjects. Speaking of the model in the painting above, he says “The painting of the woman who has found herself, I hope that really happens for that woman…if it hasn’t.”
As Burns puts it, his hyper-realistic art “goes beyond into something else…The first painting I painted, I knew it was not that that I was looking for, it was something else.” That “something else” remains elusive to Burns, as well as to the viewer. And yet, one instinctively recognizes the intimate emotional ground he treads in his work. “We’re not all on the same journey,” Burns says, “but quite a few are…quite a few are.”
