Artist Statement

From an early age, artistic expression through building, making, or creating things was a means of pleasure and satisfaction. This need later evolved into a satisfying career and livelihood in mechanical engineering. Engineering, as a highly tamed and civilized art form, often calls on the imagination to transform ideas into line and shapes of functional use forms. However, a fleeting glimpse of a scene, setting or unique event of everyday life would occasionally prod the imagination and serve as a reminder of times past when lines and shapes met mediums without the companionship of hard science and physics. Having exited the life stage of parenting, it seemed time should once again follow for focused efforts towards creative art. The pent-up desire began to grow from a quiet whisper within to a persistent voice demanding a revival. Self-taught and very much as student in the medium of oils, a brush in hand applying paint to a canvas in elusive pursuit of the essence of those fleeting images and scenes has some unexplainable and spiritual-like power of satisfaction and fulfillment. Perhaps that is enough, but the simple hope for the observer and beholder is their own discovery of the composition's essence and the hidden gems in scenes of everyday life.

About the Artist

Rick Burrow is an emerging artist working primarily in oils on representational works focusing on people, landscapes, and still life subjects. Recently relocating to Delaware for the start of a second professional career, Rick was a long-time resident of Doylestown, Pennsylvania and heavily influenced by past and present artists of the Bucks County and greater Philadelphia regions.

Rick grew up in Newport, Arkansas and began experimenting at an early age with a broad range of artistic mediums which included tempera, oil and watercolor paints, pen and ink drawings, and plaster and ceramic clay sculptures. Developing as a watercolorist and pen and ink artist, Rick began exhibiting paintings in Arkansas venues and juried shows at the age of fourteen. Gaining local recognition, Rick started earning commissions for selective works and continued painting in watercolors until beginning an engineering career with Johnson & Johnson (retired 2014). During this period, painting yielded way to the engineering art forms of commercial product and machine design, mechanical engineering drawings, and architectural design drawings.

In 2010, career and family life maturity allowed Rick to resume his painting journey with oils becoming his medium of choice. Rick is principally self-taught through observation, study of masterpieces, books, and electronic resources in the public domain. His one go-to professional resource is his daughter, Rebecca Frankum, an artist and fine arts teacher in Delaware public education. Rick draws inspiration from seemingly ordinary scenes of surrounding life as well as people and places he encounters in life’s journeys and travels.