Damon Burnard
MFA ’08 Art Education
Grids are ambiguous rascals.
They provide the comfort of order and pattern while restricting freedom and constricting choice.The visual structures they generate simultaneously combine reassuring solidity with monolithic dictatorship. They express the ambivalent nature of all structures, perhaps, both physical (walls, houses, cities) and social ( home, religion, identity). Similarly, the structures we are given or the structures we construct can be at once havens and prisons, protective and punitive.
It is likely that Damon Burnard was born in Sussex, England, in an age when TV shows were broadcast in black and white. He studied painting at Bath Academy of Art where, for better or worse, he encountered the works of Sol le Witt, Ellsworth Kelly, Joseph Albers, and Viz Magazine. He was transported across the Atlantic in a flying metal tube in the late Twentieth Century, and returns sporadically for sentimental reasons. He has made and been paid for vaguely humorous scratchy drawings for several newspapers and periodicals, and has written and illustrated between seven and thirty three works for children. It would appear that Damon earned an MSAE at MassArt in 2008 and may be teaching Visual Art at Needham High School. He has consistently painted and exhibited his artwork throughout the time circumscribed in this alleged biography.
