Vision Flower Portals

Exhibited at the Carnegie Museum of Art
November 10, 2007 - March 23, 2008

 
Crocus Lily Lotus Rose
In these 4 paintings at the Carnegie Museum (4 of nine existing large paintings) a ‘flower’ serves as the key: the Lotus/waterlily, the Rose, the White Lily, and the Crocus. Each of these flowers is heavily laden with cultural meaning and it is intended that all those meanings are understood and present – conditional to the general context of the pictorial elements.
These 4 large paintings are visionary ‘portals’ into the vast artistic structure of the “Quiet Axis”. They are intuited ‘gateways’, felt connections, correlated to artworks placed around the earth, in oceans, and in outer space. They have been created over the past 40 years in 8 major “Aspects” and 60 “Preparations”.

The “Quiet Axis” is a visionary realignment of the earth and heavens so that new relationships may be ordered to establish a new framework for consciousness. Each aspect of the “Quiet Axis” searches for the soul of the world wherein it is neither object nor belief — where darkness and light are one eternal presence.

These ‘jointures’ are often created between geology and astronomy, history and the imagination by means of making or manipulating particular materials or technologies which serve as joints or bridges to establish resonances between substances, energies and concepts resolved to each other by a specific poetic gravitation. All of these relationships: congruent, analogous, metaphoric and paradoxical are accomplished through processes of gathering, distilling, placing and connecting – combining actions, elements, energies, places, and cultures.

Hence, the artworks related to these paintings were formed beneath the ocean, and seas, in the high deserts of Afghanistan, at the mouths of the great rivers all over the world, in and on the deepest and highest places in the world, floating in zero gravity, the crushing densities of hyper-gravity, from the surface of the moon, to orbiting the earth, in extreme heat and cold, reaching into the far reaches of galactic space.

These artworks comprise the painted visions before you. Every element or form in each painting is involved in the overall branching and blossoming vision the “Quiet Axis”.
External Links:

CFA Lab A6 Podcast (Click the title link, "A Look into What Inspires Lowry Burgess")
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Art Review: Decades of work by CMU artist can challenge one's view of life
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: Artist Lowry Burgess thinks big for Carnegie exhibit