I was not there when he died early on a Tuesday morning, but my wife and I were with Mom by evening. The next day, I walked through my father’s studio. He was an artist and I looked through his paintings, some never to be finished. I made some photos of the empty room, documenting how he left the studio.

I used a photo and a story with a weekly feature I do that features the lives of entertainers and artists. I wanted to be sure the story wasn’t too sentimental but I also felt it was something I should share with my readers. It was a level of honesty I owed them and I owed my father.

I have seen wonderful and moving documentaries of people dying that were photographed by their children. It just wasn’t something I could do with my father. It wasn’t my role this time

Burton Rosevar
A & E Gallery
By Tom Burton

Artists sometimes think about the future. Playwrights imagine their plays being staged for many generations. Songwriters hope their tunes will be sung when their grandchildren are old. And painters dream that their canvases will hang for years and years.

When they ponder the possible immortality of their art, the artists also face the reality that someday, their own body of work will be finished.

I last saw Burton Rosevear 10 days before he died. By then, the leukemia poisoning the painter’s blood had sapped his strength, and his heart was growing weaker. He said his foremost emotion was frustration. He couldn’t drive anymore, and a walk across the room left him gasping. He’d accepted the fact he’d never see the beach again, but he still hoped he’d be able to paint.

During his career as an artist, Rosevear created an untold number of paintings. His largest projects were murals, and at his count he had completed more than 60 that have hung in restaurants, bank lobbies and other public buildings in cities along Florida’s Gulf coast. He painted under the Rosevear, the name he was born with, but he was adopted as a child and was also known as Sam Burton. He was 82.

In the studio at his home, there are dozens of paintings. There is one he badly wanted to finish; a charcoal drawing of his wife, Mary Jane, showing her both as a young nursing student and at her retirement more than 40 years later. The day after his death June 29, I saw the unfinished portrait on an easel.

His wife and family will have to sort through Rosevear’s work and decide which paintings will be kept and which will be sold. Some artists have been known to destroy their work rather than allow other to edit it after their deaths. Rosevear left these decisions to his family.

The artist did decide the fate of some of his work. In my dining room, there hangs a charcoal portrait that Rosevear finished years ago. It shows a preschool boy holding a puppy. Visitors remark how the child looks like one of my sons, but it is me when I was 4 years old. My father wanted me to have it.

Tom Burton

©The Orlando Sentinel