About James

 

Hello, and welcome to my online gallery! I’m James Bursenos, and here is a little bit about me and my practice as an artist.

I began painting and drawing at a young age, partly influenced by an uncle who was formally trained and whose house was filled with his own oil paintings. Later I earned a BA in art history with a minor in painting and drawing from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia and went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting and drawing from the University of Georgia in Athens. My work has been exhibited widely and collected both publicly and privately. I have taught at the college level for twelve years, most recently at SCAD, Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, Georgia.

My work includes the use of traditional materials and techniques, such as working from direct observation using indirect oil painting, which is a technique of building up layers of semi-transparent glazes to achieve a maximum degree of luminosity and spatial clarity. My practice is contemplative in nature. For example, my interest in small, often broken, or imperfect seashells reveal structures and patterns evocative of oceanic and cosmic forces upon close reflection. I have found that through the careful attention given to particular objects in space, the universal might be revealed.

My practice also includes automatic painting, which can be described as visionary art, or even a Jungian frame can be used to describe this way of painting as the use of active imagination. This approach involves improvising by way of a dialog with the shapes, forms, spaces, and colors that develop gradually in successive layers and sessions of painting until each painting ultimately takes on a life of its own, revealing something of significance in my personal life or in reality more generally speaking. I understand this process to be like a call and response between myself and the Muses.

My work is an invitation to look around and pay attention to what is already present in everyday life and find the beauty in it. Also look within, look at the images that present themselves in dreams, flashes of insight, the imagination behind closed eyes and behold the beauty there, too.