Person-to-person painter From corporate offices the world over to his own Westwood basement, 80-year-old abstract artist prefers the direct approach By: Alan Small Posted: 2:00 AM CST Friday, Jan. 5, 2024

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If retirement means spending more time doing the activities you love, then Barry Burdeny packed it in six decades ago.

The Winnipeg abstract painter, whose works adorn corporate offices and boardrooms around the world, turned 80 on Christmas Eve and wouldn’t dream of putting his brushes and easel away for good.

“It’s all I’ve ever done. I’ve never had a job,” Burdeny says. “I’m an old dog but I’m still trying to learn new tricks.”

Burdeny grew up in Vita, a small community about 115 kilometres southeast of Winnipeg, and honed his skills and creativity at Brandon University, the Ontario College of Art and Design and later the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he earned a master’s degree.

It was his talent with a ballpoint pen and paper, however — and a dash of salesmanship aimed at corporate executives’ curiosity — that launched his career in the 1970s.

“I would write handwritten letters to the (company) president. I was that naive and that forward that I would find out who the president was, for instance, Robin Korthalz of the TD Bank,” Burdeny says of a 1975 transaction. “They’d have you (come) by and I sold them some art and built upon that.”

Executives from RBC, Noranda Mines, EnCana and Trans-Canada Pipelines are also among those who bought his paintings, and their companies, many of which have budgets dedicated to purchase office art, purchased them too.

He’s even made transactions with a Swiss bank: artistic deposits that adorn the financial halls in Zurich have proven to be more lucrative than a tycoon’s tax dodge.

“It has happy memories for me because the Union Bank of Switzerland, back in 1991, acquired some of my artwork and introduced me to people in Switzerland and I made many friends there,” he says.

Among them were officials with SwissAir, who used Burdeny’s paintings depicting the four seasons to decorate the airline’s first-class menu cards.

The corporate path has made Burdeny an artistic outsider, but he’s made a comfortable living doing what he loves and is proud he hasn’t sought grants from the Canada Council for the Arts or any other government agency.

“Not that I’m against it, it’s just I’ve not done it,” he says.

His paintings are rarely shown at museums and galleries, although he remains hopeful to see one of his works hang at the Winnipeg Art Gallery or be included in its permanent collection.

Instead, his most recent abstract landscapes — wild-looking flashes of black paint on brilliant white canvases with just a hint of red or blue — are part of the decor in his Westwood home and on barryburdenyfineart.com.

Twilight’s glow on a vast horizon dominates A Prairie Sunset, a work from earlier in Burdeny’s career that hangs above his living-room sofa.

A more traditional landscape painted in 1966 from a scene near Thunder Bay hangs on the stairwell leading to his basement.

Rather than being filled with the clutter that’s the norm for most Winnipeg homeowners, Burdeny’s cellar is a gallery space, where more of his canvases hang to attract invited guests; it also displays more colourful works, painted on balsam birchboard.

He wouldn’t have it any other way.

‘Going through a gallery is fine, but the trouble is, you’re hemmed in by what they want you to paint, what they want you to produce,” he says. “For me, I paint what I want, when I want and I meet who I want to show my art.”

There are elements of Jackson Pollock’s famous drip-painting technique in Burdeny’s most recent “black-and-white series,” but he says he’s heavily influenced by the contemporary works of Quebec’s Les Automatistes, such as Jean-Paul Riopelle and Paul-Emile Borduas, who turned the art world on its head in the 1940s and ’50s.

A 2009 visit to Shanghai, where he was part of a delegation with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, gave him the inspiration for the newer paintings; he remains dazzled by what he saw there.

“Shanghai is life-altering,” he says. “The immensity of it all, the history of it all and the modernity of it all.”

Many artists rarely get to see their paintings again once they are sold to private collectors. Burdeny has a stack of photo albums full of Polaroid prints of his early works to go along with digital images he displays on his website.

He offers invitations to those interested in his painting to view them at his home, but perhaps the easiest way to see one of his works in person is at Vida Cucina Italia, the newly opened restaurant at the Fort Garry Hotel, where Prairie Sonata, one of his larger works, hangs.

He encounters his older paintings on rare occasions. Some of the works Great-West Life purchased in the past he has seen since the transactions took place.

A painting RBC purchased in the 1970s when Burdeny lived in Toronto has made its way to its Winnipeg office, he says, and Burdeny hopes to see it once again.

Sometimes they emerge out of nowhere, giving Burdeny the same emotional wallop budding pop stars get when they hear their song on the radio for the first time.

“This happened about six years ago,” he recalls of a visit to the Toronto office of XStrata, a Swiss-based company that bought Noranda Mines.

Noranda had once commissioned him to paint a landscape depiction of Ed Horne, the company’s founder who discovered gold and copper deposits in Rouyn-Noranda, Que., in the early 1900s.

“There was my painting,” Burdeny says. “I broke into tears. I hadn’t seen this painting since 1975.”

alan.small@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @AlanDSmall