For years, Star Wars fans have wanted desperately for Jar Jar Binks to disappear. I’ve been spending the last five minutes trying to find him. The area I’m searching isn’t that big—15 feet by 8 feet, much smaller than Naboo—but eventually I locate him.
“Once you see him, you’ll never be able to not see him again,” says Robert Xavier Burden, the man who spent 2,000 hours hand painting Jar Jar and dozens of other Star Wars characters onto his latest masterpiece, The 20th Century Space Opera.
He’s right. Now I can’t unsee Jar Jar. Then I spend another half hour or so searching the world where he was hiding. I’m talking to Burden the entire time, but it’s hard to divert my eyes from his garden of galactic delights. It’s like walking away from the destruction of Sodom—almost impossible not to keep looking back. That’s what he wants people to do. He tells me that most people at museums look at a work for about six seconds (other estimates put that number at 15 to 30 seconds) and that he’d like to make paintings “that someone could stare at for 10 minutes.”
Ten minutes isn’t a lot to ask—he’s packed his painting with a Huttload of illustrations of Star Wars toys, as well as images of George Lucas’ influences (hello, Gandalf!)—but the asking price may be. It’s $200,000. That’s not a huge price tag for someone usually in the market for a Jeff Koons or an Andy Warhol, but this isn’t a Koons or a Warhol—it’s a Burden.
And it’s not just the price tag, it’s also the fact that anyone who buys it will need an incredible amount of wall space for it.
“Most people aren’t going to buy that Star Wars painting, regardless,” Burden says, shuffling around his San Francisco studio. “If that Star Wars painting was $5,000 most people wouldn’t buy it.”
And that’s the corner the 32-year-old artist has painted himself into. He, rightfully, wants to price his work “like it really matters to me” and $200,000 seems fair for something that took him 2,000 hours and nearly two years to complete. Yet, because his paintings take so long to produce, he doesn’t have the body of work out in the world to establish a name for himself, let alone the kind of name that would guarantee an original Burden would guarantee a good return on that investment.
Then there’s the subject matter. Burden’s work, while fascinating, uses toys based on movies and comic books as its visual reference (he’s also done pieces featuring Optimus Prime and Batman, for instance). From 100 paces it can almost look like a really well-done Photoshop collage to those who don’t know it’s hand painted. Art derived from pop culture imagery has been popular since Roy Lichtenstein made museum pieces out of comic book panels, but even his work took a minute to catch on and for the kind of work Burden does, the mix of fine art and fan art is hard to reconcile. “There’s been an embrace of pop culture art, but it’s a little irreverent,” he notes. “There’s a reverence to fan art.”
There’s some truth to that. While there’s some social commentary to the work of a Warhol or Lichtenstein, Burden’s work feels more like a labor of love—and not just because he has given up a personal life and used Kickstarter to complete it. It’s technically fan art, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have the traits of the classics. Ed Jaster, a senior vice president at Heritage Auctions who deals in fine art, hadn’t seen Burden’s work, but immediately picked up on the implication that “these pop culture images are our religion.” He also notes that Burden might not be as hindered by his style as one might think.
“I don’t think there’s a bias on the subject matter. Who doesn’t know who Batman is? I think that works in his favor,” Jaster says. [But] when somebody’s making paintings that take 2,000 hours to execute, it’s hard for him to build up a real body of work. If he’s only got, say, 50 completed paintings, how can 100 important collectors have them in their collections.”
But fast and fun isn’t the kind of work Burden does. After staring at 20th Century Space Opera for a good hour, little things will still jump out at you. The main theme is Light Side versus Dark Side, with the bounty hunter Boba Fett in the middle. That’s easy to see, but soon you notice Boba is set, Mona Lisa-style, in front of a landscape of the Bay Area, the place where Star Wars was birthed.
Below Fett a few clicks is Han Solo in carbonite. There’s an X-wing. Oh, and there’s R2-D2 and C-3PO. Slave Leia is represented, naturally, as are lesser known characters like Cad Bane. Toys were used as the models for nearly all of them, except for a few outside influences on the Star Wars universe like Gandalf (an Obi-Wan Kenobi precursor) and Yul Brynner from The Magnificent Seven, which was influenced by Seven Samurai and also influenced the Star Wars canon. There’s also a portrait of Joseph Campbell, the author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces—a nod to the fact that Luke Skywalker is just another guy on a hero’s journey.
“Everyone I’ve shown this painting to over the last couple of days has been like, ‘Is that George Bush?'” Burden says wryly, gesturing towards the image of Campbell.
The most obscure reference on the painting, however, might be the image of Zutton/”Snaggletooth” in the painting’s top right corner. “In Snaggletooth’s bio he’s described as a tortured artist, so maybe that’s kind of the self-portrait,” Burden notes.
Tortured sounds about right. The more he talks, the more completing his life’s work sounds like it tortures Burden to some degree. No matter how much he loves what he does, he still gets by selling a few smaller pieces here and there and teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. He once moved into his studio when faced with giving up that or his apartment. (He’s since found other housing.) Now as he completes another massive project, he’s facing down the cost-benefit of what he does. “Most artists aren’t going to spend this much time on a huge painting unless they’re already famous,” he says. “There’s a lot of risk involved.”
I ask Jaster what he thought about that risk, what it would take to get Burden to the level of someone who could sell a painting for $200,000. He says a lot of it comes down to who is buying your work and how influential they are. “Are you being bought by influential collectors, is your work being put in prestigious institutions?” he asked.
Ask Burden what that means for him and his work, and he mentions the prestigious Gagosian Gallery. But getting noticed by a guy whose curatorial acumen Jay Z raps about may not happen, so he’s focusing on the other most influential collectors out there: fans. With the help of the memorabilia collectors at Rancho Obi-Wan he’s taking the painting to Star Wars Celebration in April. (J.J. Abrams, bring your checkbook.) It’s not a New York gallery, but it’ll still find an adoring audience.
“If this isn’t going to be in a place like the Gagosian Gallery,” Burden says, “then I want it to be seen where the biggest Star Wars fans are.”
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