Peter Calascione writes:
A lot has already been written about our recently departed dear friend Maurice Tanti Burlò – there is plenty more to tell about this gentle man. A perceptive observer of life and a talented illustrator, he became interested in nature at a very young age, in awe of it decades before “the foibles of politicos struck me as being grist to the mill of graphic communication. I appear to have been charged with the task to express it,” he had confided to me during his early cartooning years.
It soon developed into an onus that he exercised with ease, inspiration, unfailing regularity, astuteness and aplomb.
Maurice Tanti Burlò had a rare ability to draw in the minutest detail, at a par with or exceeding renowned naturalist painters.
He spoke with quiet enthusiasm about schooling – training to teach (St Michael’s); Bruton School of Art (Yorkshire). “Priceless” was his word.
His mother, missing her vocation of a medical career, cajoled him into reading medicine: “In one year of adventure, misadventure and plenty of mischief (for that is as long as it lasted), I learnt everything about anatomy except why.”
There, undoubtedly, he would have honed the wry and dry humour that endeared him to so many. His draughtsmanship, then already photo-accurate, flourished between pranks to rapidly acquire familiarity with the musculature of humankind (and which he would easily transcribe to any other creature).
Maurice’s early 70s portfolio of butterfly studies used various media, including Indian ink, watercolour, gouache, pastel, acrylics, fluorescent and iridescent inks on his super-realistic renderings of that chromatically astounding creature.
First results, rendered with pin brush pointiliste technique under an illuminated magnifying glass, from ‘real-life-dead’ models out of my late uncle John Arrigo’s lifelong collection of lepidoptera, were very impressive, not to overstate it.
A new enthusiasm ignited on the spot, although the effervescence was none too obvious when I was sometimes there to watch it happen. In my view anyway, the finished studies are unsurpassed in the whole gamut of definitive illustration of naturalist subjects – and they continue to turn heads even today.
While exhibiting the set in London (was it at the Drayton Gallery?), Maurice offered it for publishing. “It would be much too costly to reproduce,” they said, declining the offer politely (digital imaging technology had not arrived until about a decade later).
Unfazed by what lesser mortals would have considered disappointing, Maurice went on to produce other complex images, leaf anatomies, plants in various stages of decay, or notoriously problematical, difficult-to-execute enigmatic architectural drawings that dupe the eye and bend the perspective into compliance – such as Escher would have admired and Alden certainly did.
True to himself; true to his family, his intimates and everybody he encountered, Maurice wore love-of-life on his sleeve; humble about his talents; something of a philosopher, and above all, true to his Maker.