VILLANOVA, PA.-The Villanova Art Gallery presents Burton Wasserman "Recent Paintings, Reliefs and Original Digital Graphic Prints," on view through June 10, 2007. At the very outset of his long and illustrious career, Burt Wasserman decided he would leave it to other artists to depict people, places and things. “Even as a student at Brooklyn College, I knew I wanted to explore non-representational forms,” says one of the region’s foremost practitioners of the form. For the next half century and more, Wasserman would devote his art to plumbing and depicting landscapes of the mind and heart.

“My work is essentially metaphorical,” says the Glassboro, N.J., artist, teacher, writer, and art critic. “Each painting is a picture of itself. Each is the accumulation of a half century of inquiry, impulses, feelings and observation coming out of layers of experiences gathered over time.”

“What his art isn’t, he adds, “are pictures of something. They don’t represent anything in the physical world. Each one is a created reality. They don’t look like any thing, any place, or any person. They are expressive of ideas, feelings, revelations, points of view and insights; and making them is not simple. They proceed by fits and starts, guided by intuition.”

Wasserman is amazed by responses to his images, which often provide him with new ways to interpret his own work. “I am astounded by the range of definitions people give these images, meanings that had never occurred to me while they were being given birth,” he says.

As a case in point, Wasserman points to his digital print, “Watch Out for the Tiger”. The artist would be greatly surprised should anyone discern a tiger in the midst of what at first glance could be seen as a crazy quilt of colorful, stained glass shards. Indeed, not even he sees one. To Wasserman, the tiger reference is cautionary, denoting the need to be prepared to deal with life’s more difficult challenges.

Until his images emerge from the canvas, the screen of his Macintosh computer, or his workbench, not even Wasserman is sure what to expect. “I have no preconceived notion of how an image will turn out,” says the artist. Viewers are invited to find their own meanings in “Run the Risk”, “Strata of Repressed Memory”, “Before 12 Noon in the Poet’s Domain”, “Go Forward, Don’t Look Back”, and his other exhibited works.

For Wasserman, going forward always takes precedence over looking back. In 1987, a stroke episode made questionable whether he would be able to be an artist any more. “It was a very dramatic and shocking event. It stopped me cold in my tracks. I stopped working creatively,” says the 79-year-old artist.

While, in time, he got much of himself and his creative juices back, there was certain core work that he could no longer do. He could no longer tolerate the fumes from solvents used to screen prints; nor could he make big relief forms. So he adapted. He made smaller reliefs. With the computer coming into its own as an artistic tool, he found a means to replace screen printing. Meanwhile, doctors, nurses and hospitals became new and necessary factors in his life.

“The surgeries, the daily medications, the bi-weekly blood tests are a great nuisance. But it’s better than dying."

“Every day is an opportunity. The saving grace is to be able to laugh with the world, and not to take myself very seriously,” says Wasserman, whose face to the world is a buoyant smile frequently giving way to unabashed laughter.

In addition to enhancing his appreciation of life, his new personal realities also impacted his art. Increasingly, sharply defined geometric shapes began showing up in his images, for which he has his own interpretation:

“I believe they reflect a will to order, a need to project a utopian image with a place for all existence living in harmony and peace with one another. I believe that it lies within the potential of human effort to bring this world to within a more organized pursuit.

“I do place great emphasis on the pursuit of meaningfulness,” he adds. “My work provides me with meaningful insights into the potential to make for a better world.”

Wasserman’s work has appeared in more than 40 solo exhibits over the years. He has authored five books and hundreds of magazine articles about artists and their works. His art criticism and commentary appear regularly in Prime Time Arts and Entertainment and the monthly Delaware Valley journal Art Matters.