September/October 2008 Oregon Coast Magazine (story by Julie Fiedler*)
Coastal Personality: Marilyn Burkhardt
But there's a deeper story than simple joy behind Burkhardt's art and her connection to animals. She asserts that her work is meant to help her viewers realize the spiritual power of an animal's presence. Bringing animal images to their consciousness seems like the best way to persuade them to care about the way animals are treated.
Burkhardt's current pets include a pair of draft horses, mother and daughter shires left over when an animal sanctuary was forced to close. She chose her dog Wendell (named after the Kentucky philosopher Wendell Berry) from the humane society because she figured that as the oldest pit bull there, he was the least likely to be adopted. When someone dumped 13 kittens near her home, she cared for and found homes for them, even though it took weeks of constant attention. After the experience of the kittens, Burkhardt gained a deeper respect and appreciation for people who make caring for unwanted animals their life's work.
She gained this compassion at an early age; she grew up on a Missouri farm where her parents kept pigs, chickens, and rabbits. To Burkhardt's horror, some of those animals ended up on the family dinner table. Her family's resistance to her interest in vegetarianism led her to leave the Midwest. She set off for Oregon after a friend described Oregonians as "lots of vegetarians--and they love artists there."
Burkhardt earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon, worked for a while at the post office, then changed course, and, as she puts it, "blindly went with my duffel bag to Paris." she began a course in printmaking at Atelier 17, a studio run by Stanley William Hayter, while living in Cite' Universite' in the heart of Paris. There she learned a tricky printing method involving multiple colors of ink in different viscosities on the same plate. Within a year, she had a strong body of work, some of which she still reproduces in her line of greeting cards.
The work fascinated her, and she promptly returned to Oregon and the University of Oregon for a printmaking MFA, during which she took a residency at The Sitka Center for Arts and Ecology.
The artist's residency at Sitka introduced her to life on the coast, where she detoured from her degree and opened Bellwether Gallery with artist Martin Anderson. She has lived near the ocean ever since. Whales and dolphins join the horses in her prints, sometimes in the same picture. Ocean animals have intense meaning for her, reflecting her "reverence, love, and appreciation for things of the sea."
Besides horses and whales, dogs appear in her work--but not just any dogs. Burkhardt's depiction of her own pets calls to mind the idea that the personal is political. For her, the dogs she has loved as companions represent all dogs, and for that matter, all animals that live alongside people in the world. Former dogs, including Brutus, a St. Bernard mix, and Howard and Polly, both pit bulls, appear in prints, paintings, bronze sculptures, and even a children's book, Brutus Goes to the Seashore. These works about particular dogs bring help to a larger population of dogs and other animals; Burkhardt often donates a percentage of the work she sells to animal shelters and other animal-protection organizations.
Her current life, which may look like the result of a clever master plan, came about more by animal instinct. When she heard about a retired Alaskan psychologist who needed a roommate on her 160-acre forested homestead near Hebo, Burkhardt decided on her first visit that Howard the dog would like it. Ten years later, when the woman died from complications of Alzheimer's disease, throughout which Burkhardt proved herself both as caretaker of the place and caregiver of its owner, the psychologist left the property to her. She has continued to care for the land, planting hundreds of trees and keeping blackberries at bay.
After working for years out of a limited space in a former logging shack near the house, Burkhardt built the large studio she wanted, a 32-by-60 foot pole building with room for the wide variety of media she enjoys. An Ettan press and all the equipment for printmaking stands ready near the entrance, large worktables occupy the center of the room to receive prints, a painting area complete with a hotplate for hearing encaustic wax decorates a side wall, and a giant bronze of Howard along with a showcase for sculptural work lines the opposite wall. The room is alive with prints, paintings, and works in progress, and peppered with dog beds and horse tack for the two rescued draft horses, Rachel and Jewel.
Recently, Burkhardt circled back to some of her earliest passions, experimental printmaking and painting. She produced a show of large suminagashi prints, using a Japanese technique that floats pigment in water, and has also combined a swirled suminagashi background with nature prints, a type of monoprinting using natural objects like leaves and feathers. After not seriously painting since her 20s, Burkhardt is working in oil and encaustic, a medium consisting of pigment suspended in wax. Regardless of the medium, Burkhardt's compassion for animals continues to feed her motivation to make art. "People don't realize their true place in the world," she says. "Animals aren't just here for our use." Finding a way to convey that sentiment is her ongoing challenge.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Julie Fiedler lives on the Oregon Coast where she sculpts clay, custom paints tile, and does freelance writing and editing. (juliefiedler.com)