Biography

Primarily known as a landscape painter, Diane Burko since 2000 is becoming recognized as a photographer as well for her exploration of the natural environment.

She celebrates the wilderness in panoramic views of the Grand Canyon, Himalayan peaks, and the coastlines of California, Maine, and France - and on a more intimate scale, the cultivation of nature found in parks and gardens such as Monet's in Giverny, and her own in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. For over 30 years, she has been guided by her ability to investigate actual locations, to confront its vistas, observe the skies, air, soil and vegetation as well as bodies of water. She records her experience on the ground and from the air with cameras as well as sketchpads. Such journeys have taken her to volcanoes in Iceland, Italy, Hawaii, Alaska Costa Rica, and Iceland. Most recently the forests of the mid Atlantic range of America, and the bayous of New Orleans.

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1945, Burko graduated from Skidmore College in 1966 where she double majored in art history and painting. She continued her study of painting earning an MFA in 1969 from the Graduate School of Fine Arts of the University of Pennsylvania and continues to live and work in Philadelphia and Bucks County.

In the 1970s, the towering peaks of the Himalayas, Alps, and Rockies were the subjects of a series of paintings based on magazine photographs. Following her interest in depicting rocky terrain, Burko flew with Jim Turrell in 1977 to take her own aerial photographs of the Grand Canyon, which she used as visual guides for intense paintings and colored pencil drawings. In the 1980s Burko took flight to photograph Pennsylvania's extensive rivers and waterways. In the resulting prints and colored-pencil drawings, Burko began what would become a nearly twenty-year focus on capturing and manipulating the effects of light and shadow on water. This interest led her up California's tumultuous seashore, along the coast of Brittany and Normandy, and settled her again in Normandy for a six-month residency at Monet's estate in Giverny in 1989 thanks to a Lila Acheson Wallace Fellowship.

After a brief trip to Nova Scotia in the early 90’s and an intense monotype project, Burko, in 1993 was awarded a residency at the Rockefeller Study and Conference Center in Bellagio where she painted en plein air for 5 weeks. IN 1996 she won a  $200,000 Public Art commission sponsored by the Redevelopment Authority of Philadelphia and the Marriott Hotel. She embarked on a three year project: Wissahickon Reflections, creating over 1,400 square feet of paintings, with one single panel measuring 11.5 feet by 32 feet.

Her next landscape focus was quite different from the quiet, rolling woodlands of the Wissahickon. In1998, the artist turned her careful attention to the powerful and majestic phenomenon of the volcano. She first discovered Irazu, Arenal and Poas on a trip to Costa Rica. The following summer she investigated volcanoes along the Aleutian chain of Alaska returning to her favored technique of chartering flights to make her own photographs from above. In 2000, she began studying and painting Kilauea on Hawaii's Big Island. And thanks to a generous grant from the Leeway Foundation, she visited Hawaii and Maui in the fall of 2000 observing volcanoes and hiking over ash and rock.  In the spring of 2001, she visited Sicily where she climbed Etna, Vesuvius and Stromboli as well as flying in a helicopter for images of the Aeolian Islands. The Locks Gallery in Philadelphia featured all this work in a major exhibition in the fall of 2001.

In 2002 Burko traveled to Iceland twice because of its fame as the most volcanic country in the world.  Along with its volcanoes, she explored Iceland’s glaciers, geysers, and waterfalls. An exhibition resulting from this experience opened at Locks in September 2004. In Iceland Burko continued to focus more on her photography as an art form rather than a source of data for her paintings.

In 2004, Burko flew over the Pacific Northwest in a Cessna 172, with a medium format camera to photograph Mt. St. Helens, Mt Rainer and Mt. Baker.  She began to use Photoshop to impart her compositional and color sense onto the image, before they became archival inkjet jet prints.

Amy Schlegel, the Director of Galleries at Tufts University organized a show titled: FLOW which featured Burko’s’ volcanic and Icelandic paintings as well as a selection of her recent photographs. This show then traveled to the Michener museum from June 2006 to October 2006.

Although Burko is working on a series of paintings about Geddes Run Creek in Bucks County, she has departed more from painting to create digital photographic images, archival injkjet prints on paper. While her first series was based on her aerial explorations of the landscape from Helicopter’s and Cessna 172s, her most recent work is about her environment in Bucks County and a very recent trip to New Orleans.  This past June, the Locks Gallery presented a show focusing on this new body of work: Photographs.