About Edward A. Burke | Artist Statement & Biography

STATEMENT

 

My work examines ecological fragility and the systems — cultural, technological, and psychological — through which humans reshape the natural world. Working primarily in drawing and painting, I move between abstraction and symbolic imagery to explore themes of accumulation, migration, water, and environmental imbalance.

 

Rather than illustrating crisis, the work situates the viewer within it. Organic forms confront geometric structures; beauty coexists with disturbance. The images ask where responsibility resides and how human perception mediates our relationship with the planet.

 

Across each body of work, I return to a central question: how do we visualize a world in which we are both creators and destroyers?

 

BIO

 

Edward Burke is a contemporary American artist born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at the High School of Art & Design in Manhattan and continued his education at the School of Visual Arts while working professionally in New York City advertising studios. Beginning in 1970, he pursued painting alongside a career as a book designer and art director for educational publishers, later founding the graphic design firm Creative Publishing Concepts.

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While maintaining an extensive career in graphic design, Burke sustained an active studio practice in drawing and painting, exhibiting his work and receiving commissions throughout his career. Influenced by modern painting and Bauhaus design principles, his work reflects the combined disciplines of fine art and visual communication. In 2005, his painting Play Ignorant was commissioned to support Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, with proceeds benefiting Habitat for Humanity’s Musicians’ Village in New Orleans.

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MY STORY

 

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where drawing first became a way of understanding the world rather than simply representing it. An early teacher recognized my inclination toward art and encouraged me to apply to the High School of Art & Design in Manhattan — an experience that revealed art not only as skill, but as a way of thinking.

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Entering professional life in New York City, I built a career in graphic design and publishing while continuing to paint and draw outside working hours. Design provided structure, clarity, and discipline; painting offered uncertainty, intuition, and exploration. For decades, these two practices developed side by side, shaping how I approach image-making — balancing order and improvisation, control and discovery.

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Living and working in and around New York exposed me continually to museums, galleries, and the visual language of modern and contemporary art. Over time, my studio practice shifted toward questions that extended beyond formal concerns, reflecting growing awareness of environmental instability and humanity’s evolving relationship with the natural world.

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Today, drawing and painting remain a way to think through these conditions — not to resolve them, but to make visible the tension between human invention and ecological consequence.

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