Miami Beach 

Editor: David Burliuk's "Miami Beach" is, I think, a fairly obscure oil painting, and it’s definitely got a frenetic energy to it, all vibrant greens and yellows, applied with these visible, almost violent, brushstrokes. What is your immediate reaction when you see it? Curator: Violent! Yes! You've touched on something vital. I think "churning" is more apt, don’t you? Like a churning landscape viewed through a heat haze. Or the memory of a place... the colors bleeding into one another the way memories tend to do. It’s Miami, but also not. Do you feel it too? Editor: I can definitely see that… the blurring, the haziness… I suppose I focused on the active brushwork more than that sense of place slipping through your fingers. Tell me more about that ‘not’ Miami aspect. Curator: Think about the Expressionists and Fauves. The colors are far too intensified to simply represent the sunny beach in Florida, aren't they? Burliuk uses color not to replicate reality, but to amplify it… to reflect the emotion it evokes. And consider those almost abstracted figures amidst the foliage; they're swallowed by their surroundings! Do they evoke certain emotions or a deeper reading, perhaps, about man’s place within nature, that transcends the physical reality? Editor: I hadn’t really picked up on the figures blending in like that. I was so caught up in the sheer busyness of it all. Curator: Precisely! And isn't that interesting, how easy it is to miss what's most obvious because you are too absorbed into other, perhaps surface level details? The painting dances between a real place and a dream of that place. A memory of sand and heat. Isn't art delicious that way? Editor: It is, absolutely! I’ll definitely look at it differently now, thank you for pointing it all out.