Pure Drawing
Looking into the mind of the late Thomas Burleson
Is there such a thing as pure drawing? Auguste Rodin thought so, and so did the artists of the expressionist group Die Brucke (the Bridge) in the early decades of the twentieth century. Drawing for them was a somatic process, the royal road to the unconscious—if only the conscious mind could be got out of the way. And yet, isn’t this dichotomy a false one? Hasn’t contemporary art, long since released from the burden of depicting, shown us that even so basic a process as drawing is a negotiation between conceptualizing and extemporizing? Between the head and the hand? That negotiation is what makes the drawings of the outsider Thomas Burleson (1914–97) so compelling. They’re not good in any conventional sense; they are unexpected in every sense. Although they lack the symbolic grandeur of the obsessive masters Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger, these colorful constructions take us straight to the decisions by which drawings get made. There is a geometrizing energy that constantly subverts itself and at the same time seems capable of expanding in all directions, of breaking the confines of the page, even when it is contained within clear formal limits. Some of the works, done in ballpoint pen in multiple colors, resemble the paintings of the contemporary artist Joanne Greenbaum: they are machines that seem to run by themselves.
The mechanical analogy is appropriate. Born in Texas in 1914, Burleson appears to have had a tough go of it during World War II on a minesweeper in the Pacific. After being discharged early into the war for emotional instability, he held jobs as a shipping inspector with Bell Helicopter and a shipping clerk with Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. Some time during this later period he began drawing. . .
