There was a time when, if a man asked me to his studio to look at his buffalo, I’d assume that I’d be viewing something that did not involve hooves. That time is not now. Now I’m old, and Maurice Burns is older, and I am staring at an actual buffalo. It is black and purple and yellow, life-size, and magnificent.
Not that Burns, who lives in Santa Fe, came to Ucross to paint anything of the sort. But once he got to Ucross, an artist residency set on a 20,000-acre ranch in the High Plains of Wyoming … well, buffalo happen. Burns is fretting, though. Yesterday Ucross’s visiting board of directors paid him a surprise visit to check out his work. He wasn’t finished. “If you’re in the middle of making love, and somebody comes and interrupts you and pulls you away, you can’t go right back to where you left off,” he says. “And that’s what painting is like. You’re making love, and when some other folk appear, it’s hard for me to get going again.”
