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framed dimensions: 72 x 87 cm
signed left centre
EXHIBITED:
The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
William Burns is best known for his poised and thoughtful post-war modernist work, depicting Scottish life and landscape. Sea Town, is a powerful late painting by Burns. It is an exploration of memory, abstraction, and the unique aerial perspective shaped by his experience as a wartime pilot. Burns served in the RAF during the Second World War, and the experience of viewing the world from above would shift his entire practice. Sea Town possibly references Arbroath, translating the coastline into a structured aerial landscape, using impasto and a bold, earthy palette of reds and browns. The painting is anchored by a broad, dark horizontal band, a compositional device that separates sea from land and heightens the tension between flatness and depth, between observed detail and remembered form. Rather than describing a scene in representational terms, Burns constructs the landmass and coastline into a dynamic, composition, evoking a sense of the terrain as seen from altitude; distilled, abstracted, and emotionally charged.
William Burns was born in Newton Mearns, Renfrewshire and studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1944–48 under Ian Fleming and David Donaldson before attending Hospitalfield Art College when Ian Fleming was Warden. Burns continued to work from Glasgow until 1954. Burns served in the RAF during WWII and retained his passion for flying after. Viewing the world from above had a profound effect on his practice leading to more abstract works. He relocated to Aberdeen as a Lecturer in Art Education at Aberdeen College of Education and later became Principal Lecturer and Head of Department. Burns would often accompany fellow artist Ian Fleming on his painting excursions on the northeast coast. Both artists had an affinity for the fishing villages, communities, ship building, harbours, and the vast expanse of the North Sea. Fleming painted a portrait of Burns between 1950-54, which hangs in Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums – the artist sits in the foreground, holding his brushes with canvases and frames behind and to the left is a view of a northeast fishing village, probably Arbroath, with two figures with their backs to the viewers, looking out to the sea. His life was tragically cut short on a flying excursion over the northeast in 1972.
The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1964, 1966, 1968 (Festival)
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