Leap of Faith Print

Gregory Burns’ passion for art began as a boy growing up in Paris where he created comic strips and painted bottles of Beaujolais. During his first university art class he knew he had found his calling when confronted with the nude. He slipped into the fabric of Asia in 1984, concluding a cloistered existence painting the beauty of the California Dream. Setting sail for Taiwan he studied Chinese brush painting and calligraphy with local masters for two years. With broken Mandarin and paintbrushes he began a summer backpacking trip overland through China, Tibet, Nepal, India and Pakistan, which stretched into a 16-month sojourn. While seeking out Buddhist and Hindu sacred sites, his artwork began referencing the different religious and architectural imagery of Asia. While vacationing in Tahiti in 1990, he met the crew of the boat and TV program called “The Return of Marco Polo”. Invited to join the team, he left his girlfriend on the jetty in Tahiti and sailed the South Pacific and South China Sea for a year before disembarking in Hong Kong. Throughout the voyage he painted and helped produce 25 documentaries about the people and places the boat visited. Since completing his Master in Painting at the end of the last century, the intrepid traveler continues to cast a wide net in order to pull in a diverse collection of colors and imagery with which he tries to portray the power of the human spirit in search of meaning. Gregory has held 80 solo and group painting exhibitions in a dozen countries throughout the world since 1980 and has been the celebrated Artist-in-Residence at 25 5-Star Resorts and venues since 1999. Gregory published two books in English and Mandarin and has been featured on BBC, CNBC, ESPN, CNA, CCTV and in The AWSJ, Time Magazine and The China Daily.