Cathe Burris: No Room for Retreat

CATHE BURRIS: NO ROOM FOR RETREAT

A profile of a great artist.

By Barney Quick

"By this time, my mother was getting weekly blood transfusions," Cathe Burris says of the final stages of her mother's cancer. "That was her situation when I came downstairs from my own biopsy to tell her my news."

Such was the defining moment of this award-winning painter's artistic transition and adult life. The move from soft-focus pastel dreamscapes to collage-like works with sharp outlines and recurring symbols of death and womanhood had already begun. So had her suspicions that she would be battling the same enemy that was taking her mother away piece by piece. Now everything came into sharp relief.

"Several of my roles - daughter, artist, woman - underwent changes," she says. "I had been grown-up friends with my mother for years. We shared books and laughter. Now I was a caretaker, but even that was changing. My mother was worried about how I'd fare with my breast cancer, about whether the stress of looking out for her caused it. I'd always maintained a clear distinction between my fine-art activities and my commercial graphics work. Now I found that being blurred. My self-image as my late father's princess and a sunny, resilient nurturer was shaken at the core."

Columbus, Indiana-based Burris had already racked up an impressive list of accolades prior to her stylistic transformation. Her achievements included shows at galleries in Indianapolis, Louisville, Bloomington and elsewhere, the official seal of Bartholomew County, corporate and agency logos, the 1992 Columbus Mayor's Community Arts Award, and arts groups' board memberships. She had a loyal base of buyers who decorated their homes with her misty dreamscapes.

Then came "Close By Heavy Breathing," done in early 1993, when her mother's cancer gained in fury. This radical departure from her previous work took her by as much surprise as it did anyone else.

"I didn't set out to examine my womanhood or the nature of illness or anything else. I just let impulses come out. Acrylic had always been my main material, but I had applied it to canvas. Now I was putting it on hardboard masonite and using a nail to scratch it," she says.

"Close" is the first public appearance of the black bird, an image that has shown up in several subsequent paintings. It resembles a crow undergoing electric shock and has bright, menacing eyes.

In "Transfigured," the bird is clawing a nude woman's shoulder. She began the painting and left it alone for some time. People would ask her when she intended to finish it and she'd reply, "I can't get the right breast right." Six months went by and she was diagnosed with a malignancy - in her right breast.

Burris also began mixing graphics elements into her new fine-art pieces. Titles of works and other text appear in a number of her works from the last two years.

Two of the most disturbing pieces from her new period are "Mr. Mumbletouch," taken from Burris's recurring dream of some kind of creature lying down beside her and touching her shoulder, and "Over-Easy," the focal creature of which can be seen as a bird, reptile, or human woman. In both pictures, the staring eyes of the black bird insist on the viewer's attention.

After the transition had begun, a couple who had bought several of her works wanted to see her latest efforts. They were building a new home and wanted new art to embellish it. "They came up here to my studio and you could feel the ponderousness of the silence," says Burris. "It was the first time I'd ever felt I had to justify myself and my art." They left empty-handed, telling Burris to contact them when she had something "different" to show them. Attention is coming from new quarters, however. Burris was part of an exhibit at Arthur Ross Gallery in Philadelphia in the summer of 1996. The juried show, entitled Confronting Cancer Through Art, was sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center. She has subsequently had several new-period shows throughout the south and midwest. Burris has no intention of turning back. "At these shows my art speaks for itself," she says. "This is who I am and what I produce."

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