Trevor Burgess

Most of the work relates to my daily visual experience. I usually paint from photographs I have taken. In making paintings from these I am seeking to recover a memory of something I saw and what I felt about it.

Living in a city I am affected by the urban environment around me. I am interested in a painting that explores relationships, people, contemporary urban spaces.

Painting is a slow process. I find my visual experience sinks in slowly before I am ready to make a series of paintings. Often I think of the pictures in groups in which individual images relate to and re-inforce each other.

My work developed over a period of time when I was exploring the use of a less literally descriptive, painterly, figurative language. A series of paintings on the theme of the family, culminated in some large works done on the MA Fine Art course in Barcelona in 1997/8. After this I moved to London, and felt the need for a more concrete subject and specificity for my work. I turned to the immediate urban environment, and began using my own photographs as source material. I have also made paintings arising from travels in Europe, India and Latin America.

I do not seek to replicate the conventions of photography. Painting is an expressive visual language with its own resources.

In all representational art there is a gap between what is depicted and how it’s depicted. All the power, fascination and strangeness of painting, for me, lies in this unfathomable gap.