Marcia Burtt: figure and landscape

Marcia Burtt might be synonymous with landscape painting, but drawing and painting the figure has always been part of her practice. I spoke with Marcia about her relationship with figure painting and its connection with working on location.

Cynthia: You started off taking figure drawing classes at Otis?

Marcia: My dad gave me a set of oil paints for my 11th birthday, so I started out in the backyard painting landscapes, and drew portraits of my family and friends indoors, but I don’t remember taking a figure drawing class until I signed up for evening figure classes at Otis after graduating from high school.

Cynthia: So it's always been there in the background?

Marcia: It's always been there in the foreground. That was because painting and drawing the figure was the only accepted way to learn drawing skills from observation during decades of Abstract Expressionism, Conceptual Art, and Pop Art. College art programs looked down on any other kind of observational painting.

Cynthia: Didn’t one of the first exhibits you had at the Faulkner Gallery focus on the figure?

Marcia: The first exhibition I had, in 1982, consisted of human figures on one wall and a series of peeling eucalyptus tree trunks on the opposite wall.

A friend told me she thought my landscapes looked like figures and my figures looked like landscapes.

A friend told me she thought my landscapes looked like figures and my figures looked like landscapes.

Cynthia: After so many years painting landscapes, why are you painting figures again?

Marcia: Several close artist friends are in a figure drawing group. I love spending time with them — and it has been too long since I have done figure painting. It's like a musician practicing scales.

Cynthia: It's practice, your training?

Marcia: Yes. If a figure drawing is bad you can tell it in a heartbeat. If you get good at figures, you get good at painting what you see.

When I paint a person, I have only one subject to arrange in an exciting composition. It's about where you stand, how your point of view connects the sitter, chair, wall behind with the four edges of the canvas.

Painting outdoors, I walk around until I find several things that excite me. Maybe a certain color combination, the leafy bough of a tree, a backlit clump of grass; I try to connect and weave those moments of excitement to each other, and relate them to the edges in a meaningful way.

Portrait or landscape, it’s easier to get the drawing right with decades of practice.

Creating a compelling composition to the four edges.

Early in her career, when she had limited time to paint, skills built up from decades of figure drawing let her finish a painting in a few hours. Being able to quickly and accurately represent the human body makes it easier to paint incoming waves at Goleta Beach.

Figure or landscape, to Marcia painting is about looking.
In her landscape paintings, the figure has not been replaced by trees and mountains — it is simply what she, the figure, sees.

Her canvas is a window to her view.