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View more works by Peter Burega
Peter Burega’s powerful paintings are deep studies in color and geometry. They are beautiful, but a beauty with a bruise here, a scratch there, a scrape, a cut, a depth, a luminosity, an intensity, a look not only into the way Burega’s brain views the world but at how he processes light, color, space, line, lines, the very big, the very small, and how all that and more relates—or doesn’t relate—to each other and everything else. “I get off on the idea of putting across two totally different ways of thinking, painting big and small at the same time,” says Burega. “I’m breaking down elements but bringing them back together in a cohesive way. That’s the way my brain processes it,” explains the artist
Possessed of an admittedly “percussive” brain, Burega also admits to having had a rather “weird learning curve” as an artist. Born in Montreal, Canada in 1965, Burega, from the age of five, seemed destined to become a pianist. He never really acknowledged any other gifts aside from those he expressed musically, so it was something of a shock, if not at the least an adjustment, when he discovered that he wasn’t going to be the performer he’d envisioned. A pianist until age 18, he hit a wall and his musical aspirations were over; his way of breaking through that wall was to take on multiple majors at McGill University and then continue on to getting a degree in law in California.
Three years into being a lawyer, Burega was miserable. So he transitioned. After a hiatus on the Big Island of Hawaii, he came back to California and shifted himself and his career into the film industry. Working on commercials, first in production and then directing, Burega recalls that “I thought I’d find my creative voice in entertainment. But instead I was frustrated with all of the layers of creative management and none of the freedom I’d hoped.”
However, throughout his entire life Burega had always been painting. In 1998 a Los Angeles designer friend admired his work and asked him for paintings to install work in his showroom, Burega happily obliged. That was destiny and the beginning of finding his creative voice for life. From the exposure he gained in his friend’s atelier, he was approached by a small gallery and offered a one-person show. He immediately quit his career in TV and started painting full-time. Says Burega, “I was petrified, but I never looked back.” After 8 years in Los Angeles trying to figure what to do with his life, he felt that he had now found his calling and he has never looked back. “I’ve never had any fear of changing careers.” Part of that fearlessness stems from the death of Burega’s dad, a former economist and entrepreneur, who died 20 years ago in his 50s. Since that suddenly unexpected passing of his father, Burega, the oldest of three boys, developed a live-life-to-the-fullest point of view.
Having been a full-time painter now for over 10 years, Burega began create work on masonite panels, then canvas and paper. After a few years, he progressed to birch board. He mixed in wax with his oils and applied it all to his surfaces largely with brushes and knives. “I used to have the notion that I had to be a ‘painterly’ painter—my work used to be open and ethereal, lots of brush strokes and I was painting very abstract landscapes -,” says Burega. “Now my work’s gone through a progression in the past few years. I’ve started investigating the forms of geometry. There are still elements of the landscapes but there’s a definite exploration of the grid and of color fields.” He now paints only with trowels and knives, almost burnishing and polishing his surfaces.
He also attempted using dropped wax and then explored glazing—layering his birch boards with lots of semi-transparent glaze. “There’s only so much you can do with wax,” explains Burega, who went wax-less at the suggestion of an artist friend. “Wax is unforgiving when you are exploring prior layering. It didn’t allow me to explore backwards and it refused to let me reveal my under painting.”
Glazing isn’t hardly as limiting to the artist as wax. “I paint with a ton of glaze, so I can work backwards now in creation,” says Burega. “But I have to stay in the painting – I have to keep my surface malleable so that I can continue to reveal former layers as well add more.” And the best way for Burega to stay in the painting has been in how he now works on his underpainting. “I still have a lot of color and light information that seep through from below the surface, so my work has developed a luminescence,” he points out. “Subconsciously, you know there’s still stuff going on behind the box (the frame and the grid are now equally important), and subconsciously I know what’s back there. I experience a lot of discovery in the removal process. These days I’m as much about removal as application.”
By which he means, he’ll sometimes scrape away as many as 50 layers of paint (or underpainting paint) to get what he’s after; as opposed to layering it on 50 times to get at what he wants. The former is why he requires tools like his trusty trowel; the latter would require a brush. But Burega doesn’t use brushes anymore, or any other traditional artist’s tools. “I’m Mr. Home Depot on a certain level,” he says with a laugh. “I paint only with scrapers and trowels. Whether I am painting small or big, I work with the same tools. At the end of the day my process is very physical and I’m covered in cuts from using my tools,” say the painter.
Having not taken a formal class, a workshop, or spent any time in art school, Burega has consciously avoided subjecting himself to any kind of artistic influence. Burega has not eschewed an academic approach to his work. He can sound like the headiest of hard theory art-school artists when he really gets going about his technique, or his approach. His discovery and exploration of what he calls “the grid,” how the “graphic elements were framing” for him, the way “the grid gave me so much to hang onto cerebrally,” and how “although you still get a sense of a horizon line in my work, I continually try to exorcise that line from my life because it’s easy and I don’t want to do easy anymore.”
“Some people’s artistic schooling can really hamper their progress - pre-conceptions run rampant,” suggests Burega. “I have let go of all pre-conceptions and simply started doing what feels right for a particular piece. I can obsess on a three inch passage of a six-foot board or tackle a painting as a whole and approach it within a “macro” perspective. It’s because I let it all hang out that my work and process have this freedom of thought.”
Approaching each painting as a kind of geometrical equation to be solved or played with, Burega now constructs an asymmetrical grid on which to begin painting. This grid, which he embraced at around the same time he gave up wax, is as important to him now as his subject matter. Whatever landscape still remains often serves simply as a departure point. “I’m certainly still affected by geography and places. I’m still painting what I see out there, like the way the light plays off a leaf, but it’s not just an image I’m after anymore but my thought process in accessing that information,” he says. “I often don’t see the big picture of what I’m looking at. I’ll look at specific details.
“The grid is really important because it allows me to do that—to do this micro-macro thing, to change my point of perspective, to shift back and forth between the two,” he continues. “Sometimes I’m shifting perspective on a giant scale and sometimes it is more subtle.”
Last summer, while spending time in the dense, wet climes of the British Virgin Islands, Burega’s work underwent a dramatic change in palette and light, which also affected the rest of his painting. “It tends to be a more golden light we experience here in Santa Fe, it’s a mirage-like light, it plays tricks on you,” says Burega. “Down on the islands, though, the light flickers totally differently. It’s a denser bluer atmosphere and it infuses everything with a certain lushness that has affected and changed my perceptions.”
Hoping to give people a peek into how it is he sees the world, and how he thinks—and how he processes what he sees—Burega has left behind the world of beauty and gone inside his head. “I still have a pleasing palette but that’s not what drives me,” says Burega. “My work is much more thoughtful. I used to be purely visceral but now I’m more focused on the psychology of my work and that’s more like me. I’m very right brain left-brain: I am simultaneously very organized and chaotic – completely able to let go and not live with any plans. That juxtaposition is what my paintings are all about.”
Born – Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 1965
Piano Performance – Royal Conservatory, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1987
BA – McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 1984-1987
Juris Doctorate – Whittier College – Los Angeles, California, 1987-1991
Comparative Law – University of Florence – Florence, Italy, 1990
Peter Burega creates passionate, color-filled abstractions that reflect his enthusiasm for exploration, travel, and the infinite landscape of the imagination. Working on birch panels, Burega paints with oil and finishes with layers of semi-transparent glazing. The result is work that has uncommon depth and luminosity. Each piece is developed initially through extensive knife work and under-painting. In juxtaposition to the open movement and freedom of his pieces, he also incorporates structural borders. These architectural references create tension and give Burega’s work a context and sense of grounding.
In his recent work, Burega reaches deeper into his fascination with various aboriginal texts and lore and its applications within contemporary society. He further defines abstraction using landscape as a point of departure and the reminiscence of the ‘song line’---of making a place come alive by singing it into existence.
In Burega’s work, painting and song are inextricable. They guide each other in the same way that one is lead when painting the environment around us. The notion of the ‘song line’ has become relevant to Burega’s development as he, too, calls into existence the locations from which his work emerges.
Over the past year, Burega has developed a new dialogue. Drawing from mathematics and theology, Burega is further developing his own personal vocabulary of the ‘song line’. This language comprises images which alternatively can describe the infinite light hitting the edge of a leaf or the vastness of an enormous natural vista. Burega has developed his own social context wherein freedom of thought and visceral expression are restrained within borders and.
Burega’s emotional works capture not only aspects of the visible, but also the emotional and spiritual within. In paintings that speak of the intricacy and complexity of nature, Burega takes on both the complications and implications unearthed when trying to describe visually the emotional, spiritual, and physical worlds around us. Working with color and light, he creates a magical universe that is both mysterious and distant and yet compelling and accessible. His medium of oil and glazing adds to the depth and luminosity that pulses across his surfaces, making visible raw energy itself.
Light is the principle carrier of meaning in Burega’s art. For this painter, light often symbolizes a spiritual presence or a life force. It also represents the dynamics of the subconscious. His work develops through the application and scraping away of as many as fifty layers of paint. Working intuitively, Burega reveals light reflections and refractions that express a collective unconsciousness that goes to the soul of his viewers.
Natural elements mixed with structural and architectural components effect his intuition. Dreams, imaginings, fantasies all figure into the equation. A passage may open subconsciously that provokes an intuitive physical reaction. Proportions, geometry, tracery lines or grids, all may contain or formulate ‘place’ within his work. Micro may adjudicate macro, focusing attention within an expansive field. Tension ensues and a stronger sense of place develops.
RECENT ARTICLES - EXCERPTS
“In the Periodic Chart, the elements of matter, such as hydrogen or oxygen, react to each other to produce certain formations found on earth and [in] space. Burega takes these designs in combination with terrain and dreams to create his paintings.” “Working from memory and dreams, he creates landscapes that capture the light hitting a leaf and a large vista together in one painting.”
- “Emotive Landscapes” - Art Talk, Nov/Dec 2004
“He begins with landscapes, and then instinct and emotion take over – a visceral and daring process that leads to Abstract Expressionist oils on board . . . (l)ight remains the protagonist of his work, manifesting in Burega’s subconscious and ultimately beaming a spiritual energy through deft layering of oils and knife work.”
- Palm Desert Magazine, Spring 2005
“ . . . (A)rtist Peter Burega has established a signature style – tactile paintings whose surfaces comprise layers of oil, wax, and glazes and which smolder with raw energy. An ethereal radiance seems to emerge out of the churning voids of red, brown, and black in Burega’s paintings.
- “Into the Void” - Southwest Art, October, 2005
“Burega’s mercurial nature and obsession with process turn out increasingly thoughtful and wildly expressive, and ultimately sophisticated pictures.”
- “Process Makes Perfect” - Art + Culture, Winter/Spring 2006
ONE MAN SHOWS & EXHIBITIONS
Coda Gallery - New York, New York – April, 2008
Coda Gallery - Palm Desert, California – February, 2008
Bennett Street Gallery - Atlanta, Georgia – November 2007
Gallery 225 - Santa Fe, New Mexico – October 2007
Coda Gallery - New York, New York – April 2007
Mulry Fine Art - Palm Beach Florida – February 2007
Art Basel - Miami, Florida – January 2007
Palm Beach 3 - Palm Beach, Florida – January 2007
Ventana Fine Art - Santa Fe, New Mexico – October 2006
Coda Gallery - New York, New York – May 2006
Coda Gallery - Palm Desert, California – March 2006
Palm Beach Art Fair - Palm Beach, Florida – January 2006
Mulry Fine Art - Palm Beach, Florida – November 2005
Ventana Fine Art - Santa Fe, New Mexico – October 2006
Long Beach Museum of Art - Long Beach, California – May 2005
Coda Gallery - New York, New York – May 2005
Ventana Fine Art - Santa Fe, New Mexico – April 2005
Coda Gallery - Palm Desert, California – March 2005
Ventana Fine Art - Santa Fe, New Mexico – Oct. 2004
Coda Gallery - New York, New York – April 2004
Palm Springs/PSYAA - Palm Springs, California – March 2004
Coda Gallery - Palm Desert – February 2004
Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art - Boca Raton, Florida – January 2004
Waxlander Gallery - Santa Fe, New Mexico – Oct. 2003
Venice Art Walk - Los Angeles, California – May 2003
Long Beach Museum of Art - Long Beach, California – April 2003
Coda Gallery - New York, New York – April 2003
Coda Gallery - Park City, Utah – February 2003
Coda Gallery - Palm Desert, California – Dec. 2002
Waxlander Gallery - Santa Fe, New Mexico – 2002
Venice Art Walk - Los Angeles, California – May 2002
Coda Gallery - New York, New York – April 2002
Coda Gallery - Palm Desert, California – Dec. 2001
Ruth Bachofner Gallery - Los Angeles, California – Dec. 2001
Long Beach Museum of Art - Long Beach, California – May 2001
Venice Art Walk - Los Angeles, California – May 2001
Coda Gallery - New York, New York – February 2001
SELECTED COLLECTIONS
Palmer Wheeler, LLC – London, England
Reinsure – New York, New York
PepsiCo – Dallas, Texas
Pizza Hut Corp. – Los Angeles, California
Bank of New York – Hong Kong, China
Paper Products, LLC – San Francisco, California
Stafford, Frey, & Cooper, LLP – Seattle, Washington
Sotheby’s – Santa Fe, New Mexico
The Management Group – Santa Fe, New Mexico
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