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Lifestyle |
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Coming around full circle
By Anthony Bonaparte, The Suburban
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Photo by Martin Chamberland, The Suburban
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Justin Burnham says he often gets inspiration for his paintings from his day job at the Côte St. Luc Library.
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Anyone who has visited the Côte St. Luc Library in the past four years will surely be familiar with Justin Burnham.
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$"/>The tall, lanky, laid-back 26-year-old spends his working days at the circulation desk offering friendly advice to users looking for specific books. But they might not be familiar with Burnham’s off-hours work — producing large, brightly coloured abstract paintings.
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$"/>Burnham, who stands six-foot-six, is known by library visitors as the helpful guy behind the counter. But what they don’t know is that when he’s engaged in conversation, he’s also feeding his creative juices.
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$"/>“Every six weeks I get to see something new, like a new collection of work — and just the people I talk to. My job pretty much just entails me talking to people all day, which is a big chunk of my inspiration.
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$"/>“It’s an older clientele, as in many libraries these days … and they tell great stories. A lot of them are very flamboyant in their older age and my paintings are all emotionally charged,” he explains.
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$"/>The Verdun resident grew up with his two sisters and brother in Cowansville in the Eastern Townships, and moved to Montreal when he was 17 where he studied Creative Art at Dawson College.
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$"/>Later, as a Concordia University English student, he considered a transfer into the Fine Arts department but never followed through.
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$"/>Burnham began drawing and painting as a kid, but only began taking it more seriously five years ago when his father died. Coming from a town with a close-knit Anglophone community, Burnham says his mother decided to exile the clan to Ottawa during that trying period.
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$"/>“Every time we went somewhere it got very emotional. So we just went up there for a little while to get away from everybody we knew — kind of a little escape,” he says.
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$"/>The Ottawa trip also touched him in another way. “It was the first time I went to the National Gallery, which is the first time I saw a [Jean Paul] Riopelle — one of my major influences.”
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$"/>A year later, Burnham painted a portrait of his father to give to his mother. He says it was his first real painting since working on it became an emotional outlet for him, but also one of his last portraits.
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$"/>His first abstract piece was a small Jackson Pollock-inspired “splatter” painting and Burnham says as he experimented with straight lines and some Cubism, his paintings got bigger and brighter.
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$"/>“It made me a lot happier, I suppose.”
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$"/>Acrylic is his favourite medium because he says he’s very indecisive and doesn’t have the patience to wait for oil-based paints to dry.
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$"/>“I’ve tried oil and I just get fed up. With acrylic, I can change my mind half way through a painting, paint right over it with a different colour and get on my way. And I like lots of texture and lots of depth, so…”
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$"/>He says most of his paintings are sold through word-of-mouth with his first sale coming more than three years ago to an ex-roommate with whom he once shared a Park Ave. apartment. When Burnham moved out with his paintings in tow, he got a call a few weeks later.
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$"/>“My old roommate said ‘our apartment’s bare, I don’t have anything on the walls.’”
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$"/>The Côte St. Luc Library has recently purchasing three of his pieces for a total of $1,000. He says the director, Tanya Abramovitch, was familiar with his work and after the library completed its renovations, thought a few of his contemporary paintings might fit the new digs.
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$"/>The library has been good to him in another way. It’s where Burnham met his wife Erin Ross, a former co-worker who, coincidentally, also grew up in Cowansville.
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$"/>“We didn’t know each other then, but we met at the library. It all comes around full circle, I suppose.”
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2007-04-04 11:07:56
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