Gerard M Burns is a contemporary Scottish artist who is not afraid to express himself through the traditional themes treated in the mainstream of European art from the Renaissance to modern times.
As he himself put it in a recent interview : “I am attempting to reclaim a more traditional approach to painting, content, subject matter and technique, but within the context of modern society.”

The phrase in italics is important : his treatment of traditional themes is wholly personal, since he embeds them in the raw present, synthesising past with present in such a way that contemporary experience is enhanced and invested with new meaning by the subtlety of allusive reference. Thus his paintings are not arid exercises in retrospective homage to past masters, or mere nostalgia for figurative art, but innovative re-examinations of the European tradition, which serve as stimuli for the individual viewer’s own emotional exploration.

Moreover, he is a painter who has not lost his sense of wonder, who revels in beauty of form and colour, and works with a bold palette which is instantly arresting. This arresting quality in his work not only draws you into the visual scene before you, but makes you want to know his meaning. As he himself says : “I want the paintings to catch the imagination, to challenge and amaze people.”

A Personal Appraisal

I was first drawn to the work of Gerard M Burns by my own interest in the classical world and Italian art of the Rinascimento. I have always felt that much contemporary art is devoid of that significant meaning which is needed to transform the superficially clever into the poetic : it is so rooted to the contemporary or the fashionable - to the emphatic statement that contemporary artists are always expected to make - that it frequently fails to rise above the mundane and ephemeral. But in the work of Gerard M Burns I saw a contemporary artist who was as interested in content, as in form, and not afraid to explore, develop and extend his own talent through the traditional language of the great European masters.

His work constantly reflects the vitality of the great Christian-humanistic tradition and the timelessness of its icons -literary, religious and philosophical. It is rooted in the great tradition of European art, itself founded on the triangle of the Classical world, the world of Hebrew religious thought and the Christian world. Gerard M Burns’ frequent reference to the mythical or the religious is for me a highly successful way of transcending the ephemeral, because it defines and refines the present through a conscious recollection of what has formed it.

Importantly, it is not the work of a laudator temporis acti - it is no mere recreation of images past their sell-by-date : such work would be pastiche, speaking to nothing other than the delusive delight in the familiar and the safe. On the contrary, Gerard M Burns’ treatment of the subjects of myth and religion is highly individualistic. Although his work is representational in the traditional sense, it is never merely representational of the mythical or religious theme being treated : indeed, were it not for the titles, the allusions often would not be instantly recognised.

The titles he gives his works serve to evoke a mythical or religious theme within the great European tradition, but the treatment always suggests some personal experience - either in the painter or in the viewer or both - so that the particular is universalised by reference to the European tradition. In other words, far from appealing to an esoteric aestheticism, Gerard M Burns is going back to the primordial emotions which generated myth as a vehicle for self-understanding and to the human aspirations which find expression in the great narrative of Christianity.

Gerard M Burns’ work at its best is profoundly disturbing - but only when we have responded to the challenge of understanding its imagery and its highly individualistic dynamic, and reached by self-exploration an interpretation of its message.

Visual Themes and Meanings

There is a Marxist view of European art which sees many of its traditional subjects, such as the themes of Christianity and classical mythology, as mere expressions of the cultural interests of the ruling classes, a recondite system of references by which the privileged minority could express the values by which it ordered its life. This view gains a certain credibility from the simple facts of commission and ownership : because easel paintings were commissioned and owned by the privileged minority, then that minority, ipso facto, dictated the subjects to be portrayed, and obviously such subjects would reflect the owners’ cultural and/or religious interests.

The argument, however, is driven on by its own logic to claim that, since the system which dictated traditional European art is dead, then the subjects it treated are also dead : and the modern artist, liberated from the dictates of aristocratic or religious patronage, can now concentrate on social reality. However such a view is flawed in its very essence, since it is posited in a denial of the universality of the themes of religion and mythology : indeed, beneath its pseudo-democratic claims, it betrays a certain type of intellectual condescension, by which it is assumed that only the owners, but not the artist, nor the majority could identify with such subjects - let them eat bread, since they cannot appreciate more refined food.

But no one can live by bread alone : what the Greeks called “bread for the soul” is everyone’s aspiration, whether they are capable or not of expressing the idea. Every human being’s life -whether creative, vocational, or familial - becomes an attempt to explain both the exterior and the interior human world. And the great subjects of Christianity together with the great Classical myths are among the most potent attempts at such an explanation : they provide timeless and universal exemplars of attempted explanation, since they speak to the deepest aspirations, the most secret hopes and fears, the unspoken passions and desires felt by all - the very humanity of all mankind. They are no more exclusive than great works of literature (many of which were commissioned by privileged minorities), and demand less commitment to complex cultural acquisition, since they impact instantly by means of the visual, and can speak, like music, to every soul that is open to their message.

It is certainly true that what they have to say may often be made clearer by explanation through a cultural system of reference, but the immediate emotional impact is ultimately beyond such things and akin to Pope’s definition of the effect of poetry as ‘what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’. Who cannot respond instantly to the pathos and suffering of the Crucifixion, the maternal bond expressed in the Madonna and Child, the erotic undertones of a classical myth like Europa and the Bull ? Who cannot see that these are visual metaphors for our own emotions ?

Such themes will always inspire the creative mind of artists, since they can be treated with utter simplicity for maximum visual impact, and at the same time possess the inherent authority to convince : these are themes which are significant in their content so that they have meaning for people of every age and every background.

The Paintings : A Personal Response

Each individual brings to the contemplation of art his own categories of appreciation. T. S. Eliot The French art historian Henri Foçillon, in The Art of the West (1963), writes : “Every art is language, in two ways - once by its choice of subjects, once by its treatment of them”. I would add a third way, for art is language by virtue of the dialogue with the viewer which we call response or individual interpretation.

All art is symbolic : otherwise it is merely decorative. The language of symbols has informed painting from classical times through the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Like the metaphor in linguistic communication, the symbol’s function is to express by association an underlying reality pertinent to experience and hence to existence. However, unlike the metaphor, the visual symbol, to perform its true function, must be in some sense itself enigmatic, otherwise it too becomes merely decorative.

The symbol as enigma is the artist’s way of engaging his viewer in the dialogue which is essential to all art; it is by means of the symbol that a complex dynamic is established between the artist and his audience; the symbol becomes the painting, hence it is the artist’s message : its enigmatic nature not only enables the dialogue we call interpretation, but also serves as the dynamic channel through which that dialogue is conducted.

The dynamism of the symbol is explored in a variety of paintings by Gerard M Burns. The symbols are not new - but neither are the events of human experience - but their power lies in their ability to engage with the human condition in a multi-layered way, eliciting a response appropriate to the individual viewer which transcends the particular and makes contact with the universal.

The brief interpretations which follow of a selection of Gerard M Burns’ paintings must be taken as personal musings - neither right nor wrong, but suggested to me through a cultural alembic where educational background, imagination, intellectual and philosophical interests are interfused. If they serve any useful function, it will be to stimulate the viewer into the disagreement which will arise from a different personal insight and engagement.