Art
Bourne is mostly self-taught. He works in acrylic, oil and ink to produce images, where visual detail is simplified in order to depict memories of both recent life and his Northern Ireland childhood. He said:
| “ | I start with memories. You only remember what’s relevant. I make loads of sketches from imagination. I pin the sketches on the wall. I often look at a sketch for months or even years before I see a way to make it into a painting. It usually goes well at first but then I run into problems of composition. I have to make many changes. Sometimes it’s years later that I find a way to finish it. I’m trying to reveal something of a world beyond time and space. | ” |
He describes the genesis of his painting Aeroplane as a fear of low-flying aircraft and the experience of seeing an aeroplane—which looked like a World War II Lancaster bomber—coming towards him over the treetops one day. While doing the painting he adjusted the angles in it obsessively "to get it just right".
Read more about this topic: John Bourne (artist)
Famous quotes containing the word art:
“... one of art photography’s most vigorous enterprises—[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate—but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“In the wildest nature, there is not only the material of the most cultivated life, and a sort of anticipation of the last result, but a greater refinement already than is ever attained by man.... Nature is prepared to welcome into her scenery the finest work of human art, for she is herself an art so cunning that the artist never appears in his work.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)