April 15 – May 31, 2025

Concrete Gardens translates Patrick Burns’ deep love for the land into richly textured, mixed-media monochrome paintings. Raised on a farm in rural West Virginia, Burns developed both a rugged resilience and a deep-rooted connection to nature. His journey took him from the fields to the football field – balancing life as a college quarterback and a passionate artist eventually earning his MFA. Today, that journey leads him to urban gardening, where he digs deeply — both into the soil and into himself — uncovering stories in hemp, blossoms, and found mementos buried in the earth that he transforms into art.

His latest series, Concrete Gardens, explores these same stories through the emotional language of color. “Blue is much more than a hue,” he says. When he couldn’t find the right shade to express himself, Burns pushed beyond the traditional palette, hand-mixing mineral pigments in an effort to capture the complexity of his inner blues.

In a conversation with PAGODA RED’s founder Betsy Nathan, Burns digs into gardening as meditation, his pursuit of the bluest blue and the symbiotic relationship between art and its environment.

BN: What inspired you to create these Concrete Gardens?

PB: I was really hoping to merge my passion for urban gardening into art that was a true representation of me. Why gardening? The mind of a creative person can often be a place of chaos. It was through gardening that I was able to calm my mind to a meditative state and really hone in on simple tasks that bring life and beauty into the world. I was inspired by the peace of mind that gardening gave me and I wanted to honor that inspiration in my own unique way.

BN: You’ve mentioned before that gardening has at times felt at odds with your masculinity. Does that come through in your paintings at all?

PB: While I have a strong proclivity for the nurturing processes of gardening, I must admit that I lean very much into my masculinity. I played football in college. I lift weights. Hard physical work is my modus operandi.

This led me to the question: If I were to turn my passion for gardening into art, what would that look like? The answer is physical, tactile, heavy and rough. I believe this is found in the materials I use. Concrete, mortar, sand, gravel, and branches from my own garden. I bring all of these elements together and use them in such a way as to strike a balance between masculine and feminine.

BN: Tell us about the colors that finish each work. Are you making these yourself?

PB: Yeah, I went down the path of finding out what different mineral pigments do and where they come from.

While I was brainstorming and considering my idea for a concrete garden, I was fascinated with the French artist Yves Klein. Specifically, his work in crafting a specific shade of blue that many consider to be the bluest blue. Today it’s known as International Klein Blue. I went down a research rabbit hole and discovered that what makes this paint so special is not the pigment, but the resin binder that’s mixed with the pigment he created in tandem with a Parisian paint maker. The ultra matte nature of the paint allowed for the vibrancy of the blue to truly shine through.

I spent many months trying to get this right but eventually cracked the formula and my Blue Garden was born.

BN: Creating colors yourself is such a deep and powerful expression of feeling. Has that process shaped the way you approach each work?

PB: Armed with this newfound knowledge for paint-making, I applied these methods to various other pigments and expanded on my idea of what a concrete garden could look like.

I learned to see how color interacts with its environment and interacts with light.

These works are monochrome gardens, they create that same sense of depth that you feel when you walk through a garden, that push and pull between your body and the natural world that surrounds you.

Gardening is about the symbiotic relationship between the soil and the plants. And in a sense, this is very similar to how these paintings interact with their surroundings – the interior, the observer and everything in between.

BN: There’s so much magic to discover in each of these works. Even now, I just noticed a little figurine at the top of this painting that I wasn’t seeing before. Where do these objects come from?

PB: Those little figurines are childhood toys, mementos. I grew up in a military family and we moved around a lot. Every time I was digging in the dirt, I was finding old toys from other kids.

With these works I kept thinking: what am I digging up and what am I discovering about myself in the process?

BN: So each painting is really a process of self-discovery? Is that what drives you to make each work?

PB: Why does an artist make anything? I think about this question a lot and I’ve come to believe that I create because I know so little about myself. Sure, I create because I am inspired, but it is also terrifying and there is so much uncertainty and insecurity.

Much like gardening, I am digging, weeding, and pruning through my own mind to find some truth about myself.

I believe that when I arrive at a place where I can be meditative and stop thinking about my life, I can then truly create and learn the most about myself. With every work I make, the mystery of “me” in my mind is further revealed and discovered. The very notion isn’t too dissimilar from gardening. There’s a fusion happening in both, in that I’m simultaneously discovering who I am and bringing that into the physical world.

Visit the PAGODA RED gallery to view Concrete Gardens in person and take a foray into Patrick Burns’ gardens of color. On view now from April 25th to May 31st, 2025.

Bring a memento — small enough to rest in your palm. Offer it to the Pagoda Garden — a living archive of found objects and personal histories.

If you offer a memento before the exhibition closes, you’ll have a chance to win a new work by Patrick Burns featuring your object — a concrete garden that will belong to you. Any memento that isn’t selected will become part of the artist’s collection of found objects for future works.

Patrick Burns: Concrete Gardens
April 25 - May 31, 2025

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