I take painting pretty seriously. It hugely informs my theatre design work, and I’ve frequently created video material from it. The work I did for the Dulwich Picture Gallery commission was a kind of digitally animated painting (involving a lot of very real painting on a wall). I’ve done several painting commissions. My first pocket money job was scenic painting at Harlow Playhouse.
Allow me a brief tangent, as I’ve just noticed a nice parallel. The pocket money job at Harlow Playhouse came about because I did work experience there aged 14. They must have liked what I did because occasionally, over the next few years, they got me in after school if they were short-handed on a paint call. My first properly paid work in theatre was, rather similarly, after doing a work placement. This was at Shakespeare’s Globe. They kept me on as an assistant in the wardrobe, where I worked on several ‘original practice’ techniques, including painstaking work slashing patterns in silk. I also helped source calico, silk, leather, pewter buttons and other period-appropriate items, and got an excellent working knowledge of London as a result. It was a really fantastic job, to be honest, and it led me eventually to design the sets for a full-scale Globe show.
Anyway… painting. Which I take very seriously. I usually have a few paintings – actual paintings you could put on a wall – on the go at my studio. But I never try to sell them. I think this is partly to do with intention – I know that I’m doing them for fun – or therapy – and that my real work is theatre design. So it feels fraudulent, perhaps, to call myself a painter. There may also be the fact I come from a family of painters. My paternal grandfather was a boat painter, and of his two sons, one (my uncle) was a signwriter with an incredible ability for meticulous lettering. He also painted hyper-accurate pictures of boats. My dad is a painter of the fine art sort*, producing very painterly landscapes and what can only be described as ‘portraits’ of trees. I feel I should either pick up this baton wholeheartedly or not at all. As a theatre designer, I suspect I may also be conditioned to believe my voice is more valid as a response to a director’s vision or a commissioner’s brief than it is in its own right. An issue I suspect many theatre designers wrestle with.
Nonetheless, despite or perhaps because of my hangups about my own painting, it is lovely to see my work on a wall. In this case, the wall is my partner’s new studio in Bethnal Green. This particular set of three (acrylic on board, pictured above) is kind of a triptych, although they’ll be hung separated by windows. They also represent, I think, a key aspect of where I’m at creatively. The main focus of my painting in recent years has been riffing on aerial photos and the view I’ve seen from aeroplanes. I try to let natural processes take place, e.g. letting paint flow and settle by itself, in an effort to capture something of the feel of landscape formation. Recent paintings have also been very much influenced by climate breakdown, and the three that my partner chose for his studio are very much in that territory.
Since the arrival of conceptual art, and the questions of authenticity that it brought, painting has gone in and out of fashion. Painting that is purely representational certainly feels out-of-date, as do paintings that make an attempt at beauty without any kind of self-awareness. But, without going all cave art on you, there is something profound about the form. My claims to a part in this story are extremely modest, but I certainly can’t escape it, nor can I escape the way painting informs all of my scenographic work. Even my least painterly set designs will have emerged from painted images in my sketchbooks.
So yes, painting matters to me, at least. And I hope you like the three that LG now has to look at every day!
*If you’re curious to see his work, I’m working on a new website for him at the moment, which is all done bar the proofreading. I shall share it as soon as it’s up. That’ll be in the next few days, all being well.
Paul Burgess 