Amid so much hokum and "feelgood" NewAge rubbish, there is yet genuine vision. I added this artist to my contact list early on, and have kept writing him e-mails through Flickr for my two years on "The Unit" ( Flickr). The wonderful, refreshing and very surprising thing about Mr. Burton is a complete lack of str… Read more

Amid so much hokum and "feelgood" NewAge rubbish, there is yet genuine vision. I added this artist to my contact list early on, and have kept writing him e-mails through Flickr for my two years on "The Unit" ( Flickr). The wonderful, refreshing and very surprising thing about Mr. Burton is a complete lack of strain or contrivance in what he puts down on paper, canvas or wood. From some angles he might look merely quotidian-- even nearly dull. But then he whams you with some utterly brilliant and original, weird and genuinely disturbing picture. It's as if he began with Munch's SCREAM, but cross-bred that with several other artists, like Palmer, Blake and various wild Scandanavians and Slavs -- writers come to mind: Ibsen, Robert Walser-- the brilliant Swiss visionary short story writer and novelist-- and the drawings of Bruno Schultz-- the Polish, Jewish prodigy. And yet wblake9 remains resolutely his own man, his own creator. These glimpses of a world beyond, these carefully crafted pictures which sometimes employ unexpected or unusual techniques-- such as gathering together burned wood, hammered and pressed copper and gouache in one powerful, convincing image-- demand continued re-seeing and further study. N.C. Mallory