Amos Lemon Burkhart
,
like many kids, enjoyed drawing. Unlike most, he continued to draw on every available surface, at every available minute, well into middle and high school.
He was lucky to be able to choose many art classes at Governor Mifflin High School, including digital art and AP Studio Art.

At 14 (2012) he discovered early Tumblr,
and dug into information about how
to become a game designer or animator. This led him to investigate the entry requirements for the California Art Institute, the legendary school founded by Disney animators that is still a pipeline for the animation industry.

From there, he learned about
the California State Summer School
for the Arts, a 4-week intensive summer program available to about 500 students from California as well as about 20 students from other states. He learned that
a requirement for admission was
a portfolio that included life drawing
and animation, and asked us (his parents)
to take a life drawing course at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia between 10th and 11th grade.

He taught himself frame-by-frame animation using sticky notes and shooting them on his phone to create animated .gifs.
With the resulting portfolio he was admitted
to CSSSA and attended it the summer between his junior and senior years
of high school.

After his death, we began to sort and inventory his artwork and found it falls naturally into several different periods
or movements based on his interests and experimentation with styles and mediums.

CHARACTERS are both analog and digital works he developed as part of his college application portfolio. They reveal his interest in the human figure, distortions and caricatures influenced by cartoons, comics and video games.

THINS is a series of exaggeratedly drawn out figures. Don’t know the reason or thinking behind these, as Amos did not share much about his work, but these coincide with a particularly intense relationship he had with his first girlfriend. The focus on exaggerated limbs may reflect his own concern with body image (he was a tall, skinny guy).

FIGURES are works drawn while observing live models, done in charcoal on newsprint (at age 16 at UArts), and in multiple mediums and brilliant color (at age 17 at CSSSA). At CSSSA, in keeping with the discipline required of Disney animators, the students drew from live models for four hours a day, every day for four weeks. The pace and volume of drawings led Amos to produce increasingly abstract ways of interpreting the human figure.

ZOETROPES are the multicolored, complex layered images that he developed after attending CSSSA, and susequently while hospitalized after a suicide attempt. In the hospital, his access to art supplies was limited to paper and markers, and he began experimenting with intensely colored abstract compositions. After his release, he incorporated these shapes with small cartoon figures, text, realistic figurative portraits, nudes, and tiny animated sequences into emotionally expressive works that refer to his own life experiences. He called these “zoetropes” after an vintage animation technique using strips of paper in a rotating viewing scope.