Alex Burbidge

Facing Things

For the last few years, I’ve been exploring the varying ways of manipulating plaster and plywood, materials of the construction industry.  Pieces are painterly in composition, yet sculptural in assemblage.  The plywood is salvaged building waste that becomes my canvas and design medium.  I call them “abscraps and landscraps”.  The plaster is used as sky or negative space. This past summer I started incorporating face profiles, to play with the concept of self -reflection. That opened the door to ideas of human imprint on nature and pareidolia, the perception of apparently significant patterns or recognizable images, especially faces, in random or accidental arrangements of shapes and lines.  I think as an artist, I create to seek an inner essence of the sublime, to make sense of life.

Bio

Alex Burbidge.  I’m a Utah kid, born in Salt Lake City, raised in the suburbs of Sandy at the foothills of the Wasatch Mtns where I learned my love of wilderness and wildness.   I studied fine arts at the University of Utah, focusing primarily on sculpture at the time and then drifting my interests towards painting after leaving school, young and wonder lust.  I moved to Moab in the autumn of 1997.  Over the years my art has metamorphized from plein air landscapes, social satire cartoon realism, textural abstracts, figurative studies, wood carving and more, in no specific order. Although my styles are restless in change, the desire to express visually has been constant since childhood.