In a hot studio, across from Cherokee Street Beach, Daniel Burnett sits with his back to his latest painting. Smaller in scale than his usual works, but packed with religious potency and an acute attention to both geometry and color, the piece appears to glow against the wall upon which it’s positioned. 

“I like to be overly ambitious with a maximalist aesthetic,” he says. With numerous projects under his belt and a colorful, vivacious style, he approaches both his practice and his life with an infectious gusto. The work, including his most current piece, is dominated by the principals of color. This attraction is something he was drawn to as a young graffiti artist in his hometown of Chicago. 

“I got into graffiti when I was thirteen going on fourteen. I was at a big high school with three to four thousand other kids. One kid I met in gym class, then I saw him in the lunch room and I latched on. I was like ‘Oh, you guys are drawing? I love to draw.’”  

He fell into a crowd populated by artists and was taken under their wing. The leader of the group gave him a name, Image (which he still carries in his Instagram handle), and a style of writing. 
 
“All those kids became my friends,” he explains. “It started from looking for anyone with a
common interest. [It] was just complete chance that I sat at that lunch table.” 

Burnett is self-taught and transitioned from creating street art exclusively to more traditional mediums later in his teens and early twenties. 

“I had a really good friend group and made it out of the tunnel of teenage angst. We would post up and draw and do poetry. A bunch of us were into spoken word poetry—a lot of cross pollination.”   

The group of friends eventually got an apartment together in Chicago and turned it into a
non-profit. They hosted “rag tag” community art shows and parties, influencing each other both creatively and intellectually. 

In his mid-twenties, Burnett re-evaluated his life and took a chance by moving to St. Louis,  where he attended college and studied literature. For a time, he abandoned art-making as a serious practice, but eventually became involved with the Screwed Arts Collective after a printmaking professor introduced him to the artistic community in the city. He discovered that art could be something sustainable for him as he shifted away from the constraints of lettering and into abstraction. 

“It was a pretty natural progression. I always had the urge to explore styles of mark-making. You can view it as a letter form, but there is this idea that the letters become arbitrary – you have the boundaries of letter forms, but it’s super graphic, super flat, super illustrated.” 

His work is dualistic, utilizing his intuition for color schemes and forms picked up on the street mixed with the influence of contemporary fine artists like Takashi Murakami and Kerry James Marshall. 
 
When he first moved to St. Louis, he experimented with portraiture, focusing on portraying the writers he studied. He felt particularly drawn to women authors. Making these portraits while reading their work enhanced his connection to their writing.  

While for a time Burnett removed representation from his work (preferring to explore abstract geometric forms) he has recently delved back into figuration. This stylistic merger, evidenced in the painting behind him, allows him to investigate a broader depth and scope of concepts.  “I am multidisciplinary as an artist. Working with patterns and shapes, an attempt at doing realism, collage, spoken word… If artwork is about communication—like speaking a language—the more methods you have, the better you can communicate. [The more] different tools and styles you have, the more fluently you can communicate and switch between the two,  depending on your meaning.”  

He describes the piece behind him as transitional and informative of a future body of work. The background of the hyper-flat composition is a technicolor explosion of sharply defined shapes,  creating a mandala-like matrix. Tucked within the folds are empty dripping hands, loosely referencing Hindu deities. Devoid of the traditional objects which normally accompany the hands, the image reflects the power (or lack thereof) of religious iconography in the technological age, and raises questions about the role of tradition in the future. 

Burnett has also been practicing collage-making. In both his live mural demonstration in the Grove over the summer and the stacked sculptures at LouFest, he pasted Day-Glo triangular paper cut-outs on black surfaces to quickly create explosive and intricate compositions.  In both instances, he encouraged those passing by to contribute to the work by pasting down bits of paper themselves. 

Collaboration appears to be an underlying current in the evolution of Burnett’s practice. From the inclusive nature of his group of friends, to the Screwed Arts Collective, to the organization of group shows like The Anchors exhibition, Daniel Burnett thrives in his ability to learn from and contribute to the ongoing artistic dialogue in the community. 

You can see more of Daniel Burnett’s work at www.triangleking.com or on IG @image847.