A CONTEMPORARY MASTER DRAFTSMAN GIVES VIVID VISIBLE FORM TO ARCHITECTS’ VISIONS — AND TO HIS OWN

by Edward M. Gómez

The contemporary American artist Ernest Burden III has his hands full all the time with projects in progress across a range of interest areas. In many ways self-taught as a draftsman, he is the son of the late Ernest (“Erni”) Burden, Jr. (1934-2022), a maker of paintings and drawings who had studied in the 1950s at the University of Oklahoma under the tutelage of the modernist architect and educator Bruce Goff (1904-1982).

Erni’s own paintings, which have been featured in brutjournal and in last year’s brutjournal annual (volume two), were far-out, psychedelic-feeling creations filled with dynamic, biomorphic forms writhing in compositions conjured up using watery layers of transparent paint and other hard-to-figure-out techniques.