Joshua Burris

I never planned to be a painter. I found a box of canvases in my mother’s basement, and everything changed.
I grew up in Bethel, North Carolina — a small, tight-knit mountain community where I spent my childhood and most of my life hiking, fishing, mountain biking, and living as deeply as I could inside these mountains. The landscape of Western North Carolina is not a backdrop for me. It is home in the most fundamental sense — I know its light, its seasons, its moods, the way you know a person you have loved your whole life.

I had always felt that I could be an artist deep down but never had the confidence to act on it. That changed a couple of years ago when I moved into my mother’s house and discovered — tucked away in her basement storage room — nearly a hundred small canvases that my stepfather had bought years earlier, hoping someone in the family would put them to use. I bought the cheapest acrylics and brushes I could find, sat down, and started messing around. That was it — I was hooked. I found the process so therapeutic, I couldn’t stop.

For the first year I painted small, experimented constantly, and gave almost everything away — fifteen or twenty pieces to friends, colleagues, anyone who expressed interest. There is a...

Self-taught