Burton Silverman (born 1928 in Brooklyn) is an American painter known for his Classical realist portraits of working-class people.
I do not believe that the way paint is applied should be more important than what is portrayed.
I love the fact that there are more and more young people out there who still want to make a flat two-dimensional surface come alive with three dimensional magic.
I hope that we can bridge the worlds of appearances and of insights, and thus rescue art from triviality, from 'sensation' alone.
Alas, it is just a single image - an extended moment perhaps. Unlike a biography, a portrait cannot present the many differing moments that make up a personality.
I am wedded to who I am.
The self-portrait is an act of objectifying the self and in that regard is a unique form of portraiture.
I love an art which allows me to document my place in this mix. . . This is my past and my future. It has its own logic and finally, its own sense of fulfillment.
The beginning of a painting is a very energized, exciting time, and it generates most of the energy I have. If I've gotten 75 per cent of it down, then it takes an effort to really get up that kind of energy to finish it in the same way it's begun.
I continue to make paintings of people and their moments in our time because I am of that time. Out of that I hope to make pictures that are timeless.
In an era when museum curators were busy introducing the public to photographs of daily life taken by Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus, why did they simultaneously disdain paintings depicting the same kind of people?
Very early in life, I fell in love with the landscape of the human face, where all the emotional states of life are to be found.
My best training came from doing illustrations because it taught me to compose my paintings more effectively, to improve my colors, and to be ruthlessly selective.
Artists must literally go into a zone of intense seeing so the subjective and objective almost fuse together.
I love the fact that this art might somehow affect the way people see, and thus open a window on the world.
I am stuck with my passion for the objective world, for the constantly shifting shades of meaning to the events of my life, to the states of being of the people I paint, and to the persistent need to get it right.
We do not see everything in the environment in the complete, totally resolved, explicit character of the photograph. We, in fact, prioritize our seeing.