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The Art of Illustration by Lindy Burnett
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Award-winning Illustrator and Wesleyan College Alumna Lindy Burnett returned to her alma mater this fall to share her passion for illustration with the mid-state. Despite a demanding career as a professional artist, she travels to Macon each week to teach a special topics course on illustration. This November, Lindy will exhibit a selection of her advertising illustrations and award-winning children’s books in Wesleyan’s Murphey Art Building Gallery. The exhibition will offer a unique, behind-the-scenes examination of the book illustration and advertising industries.
Raised in Europe, Burnett is the oldest of four daughters of an army chaplain and an educator. Reflecting on her artistic career, Burnett claims that she traveled the world but found her voice in Georgia. She’s studied the Old Masters and taken in the beauty of the finest masterworks, yet she finds her greatest inspiration to be the Southern landscape and culture that surrounds her home in historic Madison, Georgia. Lindy’s use of rich, vibrant color and exquisite detail characterize the distinctive artistic style that catapulted her career.
Lindy Burnett lives and works in a restored barn on nearly thirty acres that she hopes will someday be an artists’ retreat where students and established artists can go to draw, paint, learn, and find inspiration. She graduated from Wesleyan College in 1975 and pursued post-graduate study of commercial visual arts at the Portfolio Center in Atlanta. In the span of her career, Lindy Burnett has illustrated national marketing campaigns for Arby’s, McDonald’s, Hardee’s, Orville Redenbacher, Coca-Cola, Harcourt-Brace, Villeroy & Boch, Quaker Oats, Coors, Delta, Kellogg’s, Nestle, and many others.
Her true passion, though, is illustrating children’s books. As an artist and mother, Burnett sees a great need for books that respect children’s intelligence and desire to learn about the world. Lindy illustrated her first children’s book in 2001, The Book of Wizard Craft. Since then, she has published The Book of Wizard Magic, I Live Here, The Sunset Switch, and, soon to be released, The Seaside Switch. The Book of Wizard Craft is printed in more than twenty languages and was named as one of the Top 25 books on the planet in 2002.
Burnett works with watercolor, gouache, colored pencils, and mixed media. Often, she incorporates collage elements into her artwork like scraps of paper, fabric, candy wrappers, and newspaper clippings. She uses a small, fine brush and waterproof ink for her drawings and often allows her under-drawings to show through the paint from underneath a final work. Burnett is widely recognized for her distinctive style that combines bold use of color, whimsical illustrated type, and characters rich with personality.
Lindy Burnett’s Art of Illustration solo exhibition will open Thursday, November 6, 2008 and run through December 5, 2008 in Wesleyan’s Valeria McCullough Murphey Art Building Gallery. An Opening Reception with the artist is scheduled for Thursday, November 6, 2008, 6 – 7:30PM. Gallery talk by the artist starts at 6:45PM. |
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