CAROL CORDREY feature CANARY WHARF magazine

01/06/05

For anyone who owns a Gillian Burrows painting, every day is a sunny day! Her use of simple outlines and broad patches of glorious colour radiate happiness; it is a style of work that told me long before I even met Gillian, that she loves painting.

And buyers love her for the unpretentious, accessible, uplifting art that pours from her hands. It is inspired by the ever-changing architectural landscape and river activities that surround her Docklands studio in London, as well as the cities and seascapes around the globe that she delights in.

Like the Post-Impressionists, Gillian is pre-occupied with structure, simplified form and emotional responses to a subject rather than a concern for imitating nature. Equally, detail, traditional modelling or perspective are irrelevant to her. Indeed, it would be difficult to identify the time of day or even the season in her compositions but the outline of iconic buildings in many of them makes their locations instantly recognisable.

Sometimes, the process of simplification is abstracted, as in Fishy Tale. As a result, the painting becomes easy on the eye but, ironically, Gillian’s unconventional way of representing space provides the viewer with a fascinating, thought-provoking work. All the more so when she takes abstraction to extremes: City Centre, for example, kick-starts the viewer’s mind into trying to determine whether this is a bird’s-eye view of a city, an urban maze (moral or otherwise) or an evocation of city streets paved with varying degrees of gold?

Nowadays, the flow of miserable news from the media makes our cities seem like unappealing, dark places. Thankfully, Gillian Burrows’ work, in all its guises, reminds us of how most people really see and experience them – a rich mix of exciting buildings, culture and colour. No wonder her work is so popular!