Artist Chris Burlini (right) works with Bob Green of Boca Raton, who has been a student of his for several months at the Burlini Studio in Boca Raton. Kurtis Boggs/The Coastal Star
By Mary Jane Fine
There’s an art to teaching art. Sometimes, it begins at the beginning with basic shapes and forms; sometimes, it’s a mere nudge toward this color, that technique.
“I’m a better teacher than I am a painter,” says Christopher Burlini, who teaches novices and near-professionals and anyone in between at his 2-year-old Burlini Studio on Boca Raton Boulevard.
But no, no, no, look there, insists Marcy Appelbaum, gesturing toward a Burlini surrealist piece — a fish with fat red lips, a woman’s leg encased in fishnet stockings, and more, much more — that hangs on a wall of his studio. In this warren of rooms, just before 10 a.m. on a recent Friday morning, painters of varying talent levels are honing their skills.
Appelbaum is a novice who seems a natural. Her delicate portrait of Catherine the Great, copied from a small likeness taped to her easel, quite equals the original. “I’m trying very hard,” she says. “We owe it all to Chris.”
To her right, down the row of easels, of painters, Chris Burlini perches on a metal stool, uses his index finger to blend a squiggle of yellow paint, a fanciful cloud on a red-skied landscape. The student whose painting it is hovers at his side, nodding. The brush alone gives one effect, the blending another. Yes, he sees. Yes, he’ll try that.
Burlini, a Chicago native who says his father and grandfather were sculptors, leaned toward product design in college — “it came with a nice paycheck,” he says, and smiles — but an oil-painting class inspired a more painterly path.
“I never attended class,” he recalls, seated now at his computer. “I spent 13, 14 hours a day painting in my parents’ basement. My teacher was failing me. On the last day of class, I brought in my painting. I passed.”
He calls up a file, clicks on an image, the college painting, titled Some Like It Hot: two digital-style Marilyn Monroes flanking a realist Marilyn in gold gown with plunging neckline.
But Burlini doesn’t encourage following his style. Each painter must find his or her own. And, here, no two pieces by this morning’s dozen or so students bear any likeness to one another.
Madeline Millman is outlining, in a marine-blue acrylic, two mirror-image vases: a floor cloth for her Polo Club home. She’s out of wall space, she says, so concentrates on floor space.
This is her first year with Burlini, and she’s most pleased. “What I’m getting from Chris is technique,” she says. It was his idea to draw the bowl in charcoal, then mirror-image it, use tracing paper to transfer the images to her canvas.
Arthur (“Archie”) Cogan, a snowbird down from Ottawa, a confident and experienced painter, is likewise a Burlini fan. “Chris has real knowledge with regard to form, composition,” he says, stepping back from a striking 12-by-40-inch acrylic abstract. “He’s got a great eye.”
Burlini’s great eye led him to approach the Cornell Museum at Old School Square in Delray Beach to request a student art exhibit; some 87 of his pupils each displayed a painting in last month’s “A Night at the Museum.”
Museum President/CEO Joe Gillie responded with a note: “Your passion and devotion is clearly evident in your students’ work and I trust they understand what a rare treasure it is to have you as their teacher.”
Burlini, in turn, gives the nod to his students. “If you stick with it,” he says, “you get a high moment.”
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