At the Oceanside Museum of Art, artist Robert Xavier Burden is ready to let the world enjoy his labor of love, the latest piece on a concept that sprang to life two decades ago: The Alien Painting.
“Depicting many of the action figures that I played with as a boy, on this sort of grand scale,” Burden said.
Grand scale, indeed! It’s 12 feet wide and 8 feet tall, featuring the action figures of 200 aliens and interdimensional beings from all over the popular culture landscape, which presents the first major challenge:
Deciding which of the thousands of toys available would make the cut.
“That was very difficult,” Burden said. “There were a lot of aliens that couldn’t get into this painting. And, ultimately, I tried just to have a very diverse, eclectic mix of multigenerational aliens from different universes. The no-brainers for me were E.T., Predator and a Xenomorph.”
Burden has an MFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. He taught painting classes there and, for a time, at Pixar Animation Studios.
Sometimes Burdon is asked why he paints toys, a subject matter many find flippant, especially for someone with his training and talent. He has a very good answer for that.
“It’s about, in the end, trying to renew a kind of sense of childhood wonder that I don’t necessarily have anymore,” Burdon said. “You know, I don’t see the world the way that I did as an 8-year-old boy playing with his toys. And that’s the way it should be. I shouldn’t view the world like an 8-year-old child. But I also miss that. I miss that sense of wonder. This painting pursuit has been, in many ways, an attempt to try to recapture that.”
Burdon has poured more than 3,600 hours of work into this piece alone. That’s the equivalent of 150 full days with brush in hand bringing childhood nostalgia back to life, a pursuit that is not without potential hazard.
“How do you justify spending time on a painting where time doesn’t have any value in the art world?” Burden asked. “You could spend a weekend on a painting and it could potentially sell for six figures. You could spend five years on a painting and it might not sell for anything. And so, time becomes this massive risk. As an artist, I think the greatest risk you can take is time. But time is also devotion. Time is care. Time is love.”
That love for his art form, and a desire to keep it generationally relevant, are why he’s taken on that risk.
“There’s just images constantly coming at us from all directions, and it’s difficult to get anybody to really care about a painting in this day and age,” Burden said. “So, the question is: Why would I do this? There’s a million reasons why I shouldn’t have made this painting, but I can think of only one really good reason why I should make it. And it’s because it’s something that needed to do. It might be ego, but it’s also human. It’s like climbing a mountain, you know: There’s no real pragmatic reason to do it. You do it because you needed to. And there might be a really beautiful view at the end of it. I think that’s enough. That’s, maybe, all it has to be.”
The beauty of art, after all, is in the eye of the beholder.
The Alien Painting will be on display at the Oceanside Museum of Art from February 12-23. Burdon will hold a free public viewing there on Valentine’s Day from 5-7 p.m.
