Dr. Jon Bryan Burley's Page

This is a recent painting I made of the Amboise Chateau painted from Clos Lucé, the last home of Leonardo da Vinci.  The chapel in the distance is where Leonardo is buried.  I gave this painting to Yue Zhi, a friend of mine from Nanjing, China.  Yue Zhi is like a modern Leonardo.  He is very talented at many things.

Here is one of my most recent oil paintings of the Angers Chateau, in France. Notice that there is construction work going on in the castle to repair fire damage to the church and to tuck-point one of the towers.  I like to make paintings illustrating the conditions of the time I was there.  Some artists may selectively not include such items in their paintings, but at times, I choose to keep them.  I gave the painting to my French colleague Bernard Roland, who lives in Angers, France.

While the number of potential tubes of oil paint colors that one can use is quite lengthy, I only use 7 colors in my paintings (cadmium red medium, cadmium yellow medium, permanent green, magenta, diox-purple, cobalt blue, and titanium white) and mix the colors I need and never use the color straight out of the tube, but rather always mix the paint.  I use no black.  Claude Monet only used 9 colors.  I appreciate his approach.  Also Henri Matisse often used the incorrect color (Fauvism), but the appropriate (darkness or lightness).  Mike Lin has taught such principles for over 35 years, where the appropriate amount of darkness and lightness are much more important than the actual color.  Plus in my paintings, I used lots of color-jump (or color junk as I like to say).  Thus every color is everywhere, but the amount is different across the painting.  In California, some painters call this "full color seeing."  It helps to make the painting glow.  My Chinese brother, Dr. Wang Hui from Nanjing Forestry University, says that I make happy paintings because of my colors.   

 Dr. Wang Hui suggested that I visit Huang Shan (yellow mountain) in 2007.  Here is the result.  It was a fun painting to create because the landscape is so beautiful and thick with atmosphere and light.  The mountain is crawling with people, trails, hotels, communication towers, steps, gondolas, fences, and signs, but the image I chose to paint looks like no one is on the mountain but the viewer; yet to the right and left of the image, squeezed along a small path are many people lined-up to see the same view.  I gave this painting to Zhou Yan and her husband.  Zhou Yan's husband is a really great artist in the traditional Chinese style.  He also plays the Gu Chin (an ancient traditional Chinese stringed instrument). 

Here is a recent painting of caribou in Canada from a photograph by a French colleague of mine, Fabienne Joliet.  She studies wilderness in Canada and of course I gave the painting to her.

While in France, I completed this painting of Villa Estoi, near Faro, Portugal.  The paining is planned to be a gift for a landscape planner who first took me to the site.  This painting is of the site in February 2011, which is the stormy and rainy season for the hills behind the villa but the light from the south made the villa seem exceptionally bright.  I was in Faro at the time, serving on a PhD examination committee.  The PhD student did great!