Hi Art audience, art work collectors and people passionate about the visual arts.
I’m Jason Burris and this is my online art gallery, blog and store for my original oil paintings, drawings, watercolors and giclee reproduction prints from selected original artwork.
I started my beginnings from a young age of enthusiastically exploring the out of doors of rural areas where I spent my childhood in Ames, Iowa. My early influences in fine art started from picking up broken pottery pieces from a neighbor’s backyard where the ceramicist inside had thrown out ceramic forms he didn’t like. This neighbor happened to be design teacher and a recognized painter in the Architecture department of Iowa State University. Later when I was in college he would assist me in understanding various painting techniques and design ideas of working with a two-dimensional surface.
I continued my interest in fine art and earned my bachelor’s degree in Art & Design with an emphasis on painting, drawing, and printmaking from Iowa State University in 1997. During my undergraduate years I was mentored from many formidable passionate teachers and artists in areas of drawing, architecture, and design. I was rewarded with the ISU funded focus grant and created a series of landscape paintings, paintings of trees, and realistic watercolors for a focus grant exhibition. Years later I was selected for the Focus Grant Alumni Show in 2006 and participated in this Exhibition at Memorial Union of Iowa State.
After graduation, I continued my development as a painter and I packed up my small car and moved to Scottsdale Arizona to study under the direction of Nationally recognized southwest Taos influenced painter Francis Beaugureau. Under his mentorship, I learned traditional techniques of using Oil Painting and Watercolors materials. During these four years, I developed my drafting skills by enrolling in the local arts school the Scottsdale Artists league while becoming an active member of the Arizona Artists Guild.
It was in Arizona where I would hear inspiring lectures from accomplished art historian Robert Hughes and artist James Turrell. This striving for learning continued on and had me making an art pilgrimage to Marfa Texas to look at the artwork of John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd.
I would return to Iowa in early 2001 and earned a second bachelor’s degree in Art Education K-12 and during this time developed and learned from recognized performance artists, photographers, painters and art historians.
After Graduation I would teach middle school and high school art for a few years and then the pull of exploring the west took me to Montana, Idaho and Wyoming where I would work under the tutelage of many creative professionals while filling up my creative well in the national parks in the Greater Teton and Yellowstone area.
Currently my artworks are reflections and experiences with subject matter drawn from Yellowstone, the South Dakota Badlands and several other places of interest I spend time at.
My artwork has been shown in one man shows, group exhibitions and currently is in private collections both here in the states and abroad in the country of France.
I make oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings with traditional techniques implored and applied to contemporary themes and experiences, dreams, and thoughts that flow from the ever present beauty of the human experience.
I hope you enjoy my online gallery of my art work, if you have questions regarding a commission art work, purchasing of a print, or just would like to strike up a conversation please contact me on my contact page or on my Facebook page.
Jason Burris