Kevin Riordan: An artist who's grown into his avocation

Marshall Burns makes no bones about using X-ray film as a medium. Or about what it takes to make a living as a multimedia artist.

"I'm creating inventory," he says. "When I make what I want to make, it sells . . . [otherwise] I end up with pieces that just sit here."

At his bright white studio in a former synagogue in downtown Woodbury, Burns imagines, designs, and builds sculpture-like constructions and smaller, framed collages out of a smorgasbord of synthetics and organics.

Sheets of aluminum, strands of vegetation, and strips of fine-grained wood join the aforementioned X-ray film in serial collages with names like "East of Jazz" and "Nature's Grace." Or in single pieces like "Not a Cloud" (aluminum, sycamore, grass embedded in clear resin, and blank X-ray film).

Not for nothing does the basement contain - among other heavy-duty devices - a drill press, a table saw, assorted grinders, and a cement mixer.

"I get along well with tools," says Burns, who sells to individual and corporate clients privately, and via outdoor venues in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

"I used to worry about people copying me," he continues. "But no one else can do what I do, because the sensibility of the design is my own."

The same comfortable confidence is visible in his work. It gracefully wears its many influences (Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee come to mind), but it's also distinctive - a clever blend of the machine-edged and the handcrafted.

Burns' collages are crisply geometric but warm and even whimsical. His colors, shapes, and touch-me textures often have the rhythm of music, punctuated by the quiet of carefully choreographed open space.

"Over the years my work has taken on more landscape imagery," says the 56-year-old West Deptford resident, who studied sculpture at what's now the University of the Arts. "That's a response to what's going on in the market, and in my life."

As an art student in the '70s, and in the starving artist/waiter years that followed, Burns' palette was a bit . . . monochromatic.

"Black-on-black, with black for additional highlights," he says, as a lush Diana Krall CD whispers in the background. "It was all about death and shock value.

"As I was able to grow up and mature, and understand what was important in my life, I tapped into how fun it is to make people happy, instead of shocking them. To give them something they can fall in love with."

So goodbye to the animal bones, the vintage radio tubes, the overall tone of bleakness.