To consider 20th Century landscape painting a refreshing new statement on an age-old tradition is to witness the breath of new life brought to the canvas by Diane Burko. Her stunningly voluptuous paintings of the landscapes of her travels over the past two decades enrich and confront her audience with a sense of the monumentality of nature both from her point of view and from the grand scale of her work. Reminiscent of the scale of salon-style presentations of the 19th century, Burko treats her subjects with the cold objectivity of a modernist's eye. Distancing herself from her motif, Burko made calculated studies of aerial perspectives photographed by her from a small plane chartered for expeditions over the mountains and canyons in the American West and other places she visited. This intense commitment to objectify nature resulted in large, analytical paintings that portray an arid, crystalline landscape wherever she travelled. Burko eventually purged her paintings of their geological scrutiny in the mid 1980s as she brought her canvas closer to the site seeking in a warmer affinity with nature. Evidence of this treatment can be found in the small studies made at Philadelphia's Morris Arboretum in 1983 which appear to launch her landscapes in a new direction. For every trip she made through the countryside, Burko found fodder for her camera and her palette: the coasts of California, Brittany, Normandy - each trip resulting in new light and new colors for exploration. The canvases, transformed by bravura brushwork and buttery pigment, show the mature artist's authoritative confrontation of her subject. More recent paintings in the 1990s revisit the sites of earlier masters, the benefits of grants and fellowships that placed her on the European continent for an extended period. Such scenes as Monet's lily pond at Giverny describe a renewed affection for familiar sites while awakening traditions of landscapes past to transmutation by a modern realist. Diane Burko maintains a studio in the Philadelphia environs. The exhibition of her more than twenty large paintings has been on tour to several college campuses in the East and was organized by the Payne Gallery of Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. For more of Diane Burko, visit www.dianeburko.com Après-Midi. Diane Burko. Oil on canvas. 1990. 84 x 60" Collection of Sueyun and Gene Locks.