Kevin passes away this morning after a three-year fight with brain cancer. A brilliant painter, the source of much pointed insight and incisive wry wit, a good story-teller, and all-around warm and lively friend. His embodied presence, removed, now transforms to empty space. We met way back during the infamous Conrans-Habitat catalog shooting that Bill was doing in the summer of 1990. Kevin was working for the Conrans crew, I was an assistant for Bill. Hot summer day after hot summer day, on location in Peters Valley for the first half of the shoot, a sense of humor was necessary. Then Kevin and I drove a U-haul truck full of furniture and location gear all the way to Acadia National Park, ME. Many stories to tell about that adventure. Nothing like shooting a four-poster bed on the top of Cadillac Mountain at dawn. It was an auspicious starting point for many friendships: I think it was all the lobster (lobstah) consumed in Bar Harbor (Bahhabba) with the crew. On the way back, we filled a huge cooler with lobsters and dry ice, and had a big dinner at John and Laurel’s place back in PV.
Kevin’s aunt has a place in Venice, but I never was able to make it when Kevin spent time there. A missed opportunity as I slogged around in the chill of northern Europe. We instead exchange postcards and emails over the years from points in between here and there. Many shared dinners in New York and New Jersey along with friends Bill and Andrea, Stefan and Ellen, and all the others that bread was broken with. And Kevin’s painting: Intriguing process. Drawing from cultural flotsam, re-producing re-productions, obscuring roots, with a solid and dedicated technique. (See the memorial webspace for many reproductions of his three most recent series of work). Labels is the most direct work — deeply humorous, wry, scalding, beautiful. An earlier series of work, Mt. Fuji confused me at first, before I understood Kevin’s wit. The entire series based on images once or twice removed from the mountain itself. Stripped of the romance of landscape painting, wit and skill takes over the canvas — where a collision of random kanji characters from instruction manuals for the ubiquitous Japanese electronic devices that clutter our lives decorate the meditative re-presentations of that iconic volcano. And color, more staid a decade and more ago, but the Eiffel Tower series is fundamentally about color, the radiations of color energy that explode from every object that we are surrounded by. Same with the Wave series which plays with the surface of the canvas, the quality of reflectivity it exhibits, and, again, color. And because Light of color of Light is the radiation that we all experience the world through, it reaches deepest in paintings. good paintings, that is. And Kevin’s work is REALLY GOOD.
We subterraneans mostly ignore all this radiation, instead focusing on what things are supposed to look like “out there” — that’s how we miss the true nature of the world:
seeing mind in things
seeing things, you see the mind; without things, mind does not appear.
in the ten directions, open or blocked, the true mind is omnipresent.
if you conceive intellectual interpretation, it turns into a false view.
if you can see objects without minding, then you will see the face of enLightenment.
— Chang Po-Tuan
Kevin’s seeing was of this nature. Fundamental, without the baggage of fluffy academic pseudo-intellect. Rather: incisive, intelligent, disciplined, having a sensuous dose of warmth alternately in the form of humor and in the form of that self-effacing obscuration. As though the full-tilt attention and vision stripped of pretension would overload the viewer. He made it a trifle more safe to experience, without taking the soul of the Light away.
I was also able to activate a guestbook [ed: no longer active] on his website kevinburger.com.
All this brings reflections on the rootlessness of being. A majority of the people I have met on the long kilometers of self-displacing motion are based in a single physical location, and have been for a good amount of time. Traveling some, perhaps an exchange or residency in another country, moving within a city or small region. On occasion a major relocation, a life movement. But rare. More rooted in a local community. Connected to a local scene. Changing jobs occasionally, sometimes not at all. Stable. stabilis. Socially productive. Personally productive. Transformative. No green pastures, however. I was stripped of that option the moment I was bundled into a car and driven from Anchorage, Alaska to McLean, Virginia to South Acton, MA to Calimesa, CA to Clarksburg, MD. in seven short years. Dis-locations became the baseline. Missing the development of community and friendships except as a remote activity. Back to remote presence. As praxis. And time passes while bodies wear out. sheesh.