Austin Burke: Art Dedicated to Community
Here is my monthly article on an artist from the Anthracite Region. If you like Burke's work, you can become an owner of one of his paintings at an online auction. Read to the end for more info.
In hard times community can save. Not the online kind, but community made up of neighbors and friends who share the same problems, pains and joys.
Building community is hard work. Getting along with our neighbors can seem like an overwhelming challenge, especially in contentious times, but learning to live and work together is the bedrock of any society.
Artist Austin Burke has devoted his life to building and sustaining community. Today he does it as a painter with a mission. Through his art, he is preserving the rich architectural and spiritual heritage of Northeastern Pennsylvania, honoring, church by church, painting by painting, the diverse communities of faith of the region.
A native of Northeastern Pennsylvania, Austin Burke lives in Archbald, the town where he was born. Founded in 1845, the settlement attracted many Irish Catholics fleeing the potato famine in Ireland. Burke’s great-grandparents arrived from County Mayo.
For two generations, the Burke men worked in the mines as the women kept the family afloat. Austin Burke’s parents were able to study to become teachers. After high school, he went away to college to study engineering. Then he was drafted. After completing his military service, his life took a different course.
When he returned to the Scranton area, his two older brothers had already moved away in search of better jobs. Rather than follow in their footsteps, Austin Burke decided to stay and work to create greater opportunity at home. He began what became a 40-year career at the Scranton Chamber of Commerce. From 2003 to 2011, he served as Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development under Governor Ed Rendell.
In 1997, sitting on a beach in Florida, he looked up at a sky of cumulus clouds and felt the urge to paint. He borrowed his children’s watercolor set, took a brush, and has been painting ever since.
From painting the sky, Austin moved to trees, from trees he moved on to community, the people, the monuments, the landscapes of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Having already acquired the skills of a draftsman, he was a natural for architectural drawing. A careful observer who takes in his subject from all angles and in all kinds of light, he is also a gifted colorist, and his love of clouds and sky traverses his painting career.
When he retired in 2013, Austin went back to school. At his alma mater, Keystone College, he enrolled in art classes, studying color theory, perspective and drawing. Upon the school’s 150th anniversary in 2018, Burke was awarded a Doctorate of Humane Letters in recognition of his contributions to community and his love of art.
For many years, work and family filled Burke’s life. There was little time for painting, but he found time for the works of painters he loves: Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, George Inness. Since he began painting, their work continues to inspire his own: the strong light and clean lines of Hopper, Homer’s attention to the American scene, the landscapes of Inness, a 19th century painter already aware of how industry was destroying the land.
Austin Burke has also entered into dialogue with painter John Willard Raught, Scranton’s impressionist. In his 1927 painting of Harrison Avenue Bridge, seen from above, Raught creates a glowing, panoramic view of Scranton. Burke chose to paint the bridge from below, looking up at it from the riverbed. In this painting, he celebrates both nature and community efforts to restore and preserve Scranton’s environment.
Another Pennsylvania painter has powerfully marked the work of Burke: Charles Demuth, born in Lancaster in 1883, a pioneer of American art’s first modernist movement, “precisionism.” Inspired by cubism yet committed to realism, precisionist painters used clean lines, solid form, and clarity to depict industrial landscapes changing the face of the United States. Unlike the cubists, they did not fracture objects, but often fractured light, rendering it geometrically.
Precisionist painters approached their industrial subjects with almost religious awe. Here was a movement that worshipped science and progress.
Austin Burke, inspired by the precisionists’ work, has adopted their artistic principles to celebrate places of worship themselves, as exemplified by his painting “United in Faith.” Fractured light, the play of perspective, strong color, clean lines. And a tribute to community.
In his hometown of Archbald, three Catholic parishes have had to merge, sharing priests and resources. Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Sacred Heart of Mary, and Saint Mary of Czestochowa now form Christ the King Parish. Different communities and ethnic backgrounds, parishioners who had not worshipped together before, are building a new church community, facing the challenges we all must face to learn to get along.
In his painting, the artist recognizes these challenges and gathers the three churches together, placing them in visible light, what Austin Burke’s active faith would call the guiding light of Christ.
This past year, in an act of stewardship, Burke has been painting churches throughout the Scranton Diocese and beyond and has donated every canvas to the Catholic Fondation of the Diocese. They will be sold at an online auction beginning April 13th and are already on view.
Meanwhile, Austin Burke continues painting the people and places he loves, pursuing his lifelong dedication to community.
See more of Burke’s work at Austin Burke Art
A Portrait of Faith: Art Auction to celebrate Churches of the Diocese of Scranton
· Over 20 original pieces by accomplished artist Austin Burke will be up for auction online from April 13, 2026 to May 1, 2026.
· All proceeds will benefit the Catholic Foundation and expand its impact on parishes, schools, and Catholic Ministries. Paintings on view at foundersauction.givesmart.com