Artist as Prophet
The draftsman has double vision. He sees everything as both object and emblem. The tension generated by this binary perception provides the motor force and the methodology for most of what he undertakes. It is also the source of grave frustration. Again and again he finds himself wavering undecided between the fact and the sign, between the evidence of the senses and the illumination of the spirit.
-Virgil Burnett, Object and Emblem
Virgil Burnett believed the artist to be endowed with a spiritual second sight. He or she beholds the world through the senses and comprehends it through a faculty of artistic sensibility. Burnett understood art as a mystical endeavor, a way for man to see beyond the material and into the immaterial. An artist beholds the world with the responsibility to recreate it “so scrupulously that he invents a reality of his own, one that counterfeits dream,”[1] just as Burnett’s Beowulf (in the lithograph displayed below) beholds the landscape before him. Beowulf’s determined gaze indicates a desire to pay tribute to the land and immortalize it in legend.
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| "Daedalus,” Virgil Burnett, Skiamachia: a Fantasy (Erin, Ont.: Porcupine’s Quill, 1982) |
| Daedalus sits hunched over, furiously working on the plans for The Labyrinth in which to keep the Minotaur. The figure of Daedalus is an artistic innovator, and the intensity of his position underscores a high degree of concentration and frustration, the timeless and universal feelings that plague an artist. |
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| [Untitled], Beowulf, translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland Kevin, lithographs by Virgil Burnett (London: Folio Society, 1973) |
| The young hero stands looking out at a vast landscape. The lithograph shows Beowulf daunted by his duty; the fate of his brethren rests on his shoulders. The image reflects the eternal burden of an immense responsibility, similar to the pressure the artist faces in his role in society. |
[1] Virgil Burnett, Karl Griffiths-Fulton, and Margaret Mallory-Smyth. Object and Emblem.( Waterloo, Ont.: Stonegarden Studios, 2010), 8