#matthewburrows
I have studio envy; seeing artist Matthew Burrows MBE in his purpose-built space. He looks as one with his environment.
What is your background and how did your enjoyment for painting develop?
Matthew. I grew up in an artistic family. My dad was a painter at heart, yet he earned his living as a graphic designer, and my mum was an art teacher. I grew up surrounded by art and spent all of my childhood drawing and making things. When it came to writing things down at school, I was a bit of a failure. I think I took my English exam four times, my math possibly five, before I passed them; I had to pass them to go to art school. My mum and dad were very supportive and gave me an awful lot of freedom to explore, and they always had the materials to hand. I can write now; there was just something at the time that stopped me from doing it. I realise now that I enjoy writing and can write when there’s a creative element. If I’m writing for the sake of it, I lose interest.
I grew up on the Wirral, in the North West. But, I went to a school specialising in art in Cheshire, which had some great art teachers. Between the age of 16 and leaving A-levels, there were two or three years when you could go on these residential art courses abroad, mainly in Italy. It was a game changer for me in confidence and ambition. You would get to do massive sculptures, large paintings and all sorts. As soon as I got a large painting in my hands, I knew that is what I was going to do for the rest of my life. Painting and making things was the only time that I felt a level of happiness or grounded in my life.
After school, I did a foundation course in Chester, and then I went to Birmingham to do a BA in fine art and specialised in painting, and from there, I went to the Royal College in London to do an MA in painting. That would’ve been 1993 to ’95. The BA was tough; you’re learning so much about yourself, your strengths and weaknesses. I came out of my BA quite confident; I felt like I’d done my best. In contrast, I went out of my MA feeling flat. In hindsight, there’s a lot of pressure to be successful, to become the next famous artist; I think that is the most unhelpful thing in the world to creativity. You should not care.
Matthew Burrows in his studio.
“The fragility of living as an artist and in the gig economy in a way is what gave me the sort of wherewithal to do the Artist Support Pledge.”
I came out of the Royal College, actually in a good position, I had London and New York galleries. I was showing over the world. I was making a living straight from my BA. So in the eyes of others, I probably looked like I was doing well and that I had got everything right. But, from my perspective, I felt like I was getting it all wrong and wasn’t enjoying making paintings anymore. So I would go to the studio, diligently working every day, but even just mixing colours felt uncomfortable. It wasn’t that I didn’t like painting; I love painting. There was a level of expectation that I’d internalised; I think that wasn’t helpful. I realised that it is dangerous for any young artist who succeeds too early. I was still on my journey. People had told me to stop still, stylistically, I just got restless. What I knew at the time was that the work I was making wasn’t the work I was going to make. But that was the point, the journey I was on at that time. Nobody was applying this pressure maliciously, and they might not have even been doing it at all, and I was not mature enough to see that. I couldn’t see the bigger picture to sort of understand it.
So how did you move forward with your work and make the move to the South East?
Matthew. I lived in America on a scholarship from late 1995 to ’96; then, I returned to the UK in mid ’96 to do an exhibition, which didn’t happen. So that gave me this moment where I thought, OK, I can rewrite the rules. But at the same time, I got a job teaching at the University of Huddersfield as a part-time senior lecturer in painting and drawing. That had a significant influence on me; it meant that I had to stand in other people’s shoes and say, what does it look like and feel like to be an artist? So although it was tricky at the time, being such a young artist gave me an external view of myself and where I was as an artist. That experience gave me the confidence in effect to start again.
Then I took a year out to do an artist in residency at Gloucester Cathedral for the millennium academic year; 1999 to 2000, which was fabulous. That gave me focused time where I didn’t have to do anything other than make work. I had a place to live, a studio to work in and I was paid to do it. I remember thinking that all artists should live like this, I wasn’t paid a lot, but it was enough to live, I had a lovely house and a studio, it was everything I needed. At the end of my time there, I had an exhibition at the cathedral and the local museum. That experience set me up and showed me where I am most grounded and happy as an artist.
I now show with Vigo Gallery in London; I’ve had a great relationship with them for eight years.
We moved out of London around 2005 to Brighton initially. I was nervous about leaving my artistic friends and communities in London. Social media wasn’t so prevalent, and I thought I needed to maintain and develop my connections. I’d been out of art school long enough by that point where I wasn’t getting the critical conversation around my work and with other artists that I’d had right at the beginning of my career or at art school. So I missed it, you want somebody to sort of throw something odd at you or something unexpected. Do I go back to art school and do more? I thought, I’ve done all the education I can do. By this point, I was married, had a child, and had other opportunities. I couldn’t just go and do those and actually, if I did do another MA for example, my tutors would be my friends and colleagues. What dawned on me was the realisation that we could all help each other in our artistic development, without the need to pay expensive course fees.
So, I set up something called ABC Projects; it was never really a serious name, it stood for Artist Boot Camp, which we jokingly called it. I just got friends together, typically two, three or four of us, every three months for two to three days. And we went through an intensive critical process, which I had spent time developing over the previous few years. Since then, I’ve developed that further, and then people started hearing that I was doing it. It was probably about five years ago, after being asked repeatedly, I thought, OK, I’ll start teaching other people to do it.
I ran short courses here at the studio for a couple of days to teach other people what we do and how it works. Essential to this, was the need to create a culture with a bond of trust and generosity embedded. Otherwise, it wouldn’t work. In the spirit of generosity, we were each there to help one another on whatever level. So it was really effective in getting things done. I’ve been doing that for years; it has run alongside my painting. One of the things we did at ABC Projects (now called Artist Support Projects) is we paint a picture, not literally, but in words of what we want our life to be like and one of the things I put on it, when I first started doing this was I want to design and build a studio appropriate for the kind of work I make. Then as a group, we try to drive everything towards making those ambitions a reality. So I think five years or so after starting to do that, I eventually got my studio built, which was evident in my head that the process worked.
My studio overlooks the Tillingham Valley. Friends said, do you think the landscape will influence your work? Well, no doubt, but I wasn’t quite sure how. I knew it wasn’t going to affect it simply by me painting the view. Before I moved to East Sussex, I had just started running, I went further and further and then I got into long-distance running, and from that, I progressed to ultra mountain running. Most races are 50 miles or hundred kilometres; I do three or four of those a year. I’ve developed this relationship with the landscape that was utterly unexpected to me. The more wild the countryside, the better the run. Not because it’s easier, it’s more challenging. One day, I was running up the hill opposite the studio. It occurred to me that the way I moved across the landscape was a lot like how I draw on a piece of paper with a pencil.
“There is a saying that mystics use; the way you do anything is the way you do everything.”
Matthew Burrows in his studio.
And that is the ultimate goal so that you manifest the same sense of self in everything you do. So, you’re not putting on different hats all the time. That is the key to what I do as a painter; I realised that, in a way, culture is about our relationship to being part of nature rather than being separate from it. Although my paintings look abstract, I think of them as paintings of a landscape. They’re not paintings of a classic view; they are patterns in a way that take various ideas from nature.
I am working on a series of paintings called Lineaments, a word that describes the lines on your face and the lines of the landscape’s topography. So it is that relationship between the structure of ourselves and the structure of a landscape. Bizarrely, I think of myself as a realist. I want to create paintings that are most like a reality. In my drawings, I realised how I moved and understood the rhythms of a line of trees or a field, river or whatever; it wasn’t always an object. It could be rain, wind…; I tried to find a way of making paintings out of that. It took me a few years to do and in a way, what it came down to was taking the drawing and motif and almost rewilding them into a painting.
A river runs along the path of least resistance, but that path probably won’t be the most efficient route or the direction we’d like it to go.
It has started to make sense to me within the last five years, and I can enjoy the journey. I used to worry if I was making paintings that were good enough. I don’t care anymore.
You can’t be creative in total isolation; you need a sort of friction with other people. I don’t mean that negatively, but I mean, in a sense, that ideas need to be bounced around, even if it’s not verbally, even if it’s something you see that is unusual; you need an input that throws them off balance in some way. With the gift of hindsight, given the last 15 years of my life and what happened with the Artist Support Pledge, I can see that all those things happen for a reason, but you know, many times things were happening, and I was thinking, I don’t understand why this is happening.
How did the Art Support Pledge start and develop?
Matthew. I’d been thinking about how my work should be seen. I felt that a traditional gallery space, where my work is typically seen, never felt like the ideal location. So I started to imagine the best environment for my work to exist. I decided to make a model of it. That model was a kind of community building, which sat in a community with environments for communal interaction, reflection, celebration, and growing food. That is where I think art should be, in that interaction between people’s personal wellbeing, collective wellbeing, and environmental responsibilities. So, they feed themselves in a direct relationship to the natural world. Then I decided to make the paintings to put in this building. I started doing that just before lockdown.
I imagined our support pledge being like the digital version of that building. It would look after the artist’s wellbeing through connecting the community. So it wasn’t you on your own; you will be connected to everybody else. And it had to exist within a sustainable model. I didn’t have all the answers to that, but I knew when I set it up that I had two things that I could work with; one was this community of trust and generosity that I built through doing ABC Projects. And two, I knew that I had artworks in the studio that never really got into the mainstream market because they’re drawings or paintings that are too small. They don’t get into the mainstream market because they don’t sell for a high enough price to justify the gallery selling them. Many artists have work in their studios, even very successful artists that never really make it into the mainstream market. So I thought, OK, I’ve got to try and create an economy for those pieces of artwork. And the way to do it is to use this community of trust and generosity that I’d already built up. When I set it up, I thought it would probably impact a few of my mates, the people I’ve been working with on ABC Projects and maybe some of my ex-students.
I came up with the idea that it had to be an act of generosity to do it, so the price had to be relatively low, and there had to be an act of generosity within the process. That’s why there’s the pledge; it’s not just a selling platform; there’s a point (following successful sales) where you were obliged to support somebody else. The formula for supporting others was a gut instinct about what felt reasonable and generous. I landed on £1,000, - when you have earned £1,000 in sales, you pay £200 to buy another artist’s work, that’s 20% of your income. It’s a generous act! If it doesn’t hurt a little bit, it’s perhaps not generosity!
I wanted to keep the numbers easy to understand, especially given the global nature of the pledge and the need to make it simple for international transactions.
Matthew Burrows in his studio.
“Without exception, the Artist Support Pledge is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done; it was like being in the middle of a whirlwind, that was challenging, but also ridiculously exciting.”
I posted the first prints I had in the studio one evening, about eight o’clock in the evening, with an explanation; by lunchtime the following day, I’d made my first pledge. So I’d had sold £1,000 worth, and I thought, oh, that was it quick. I had thought if I could do that in a month, that would be pretty good. But to do it overnight, £1,000 for doing very little, other than putting it on my Instagram account. And then I was able to buy another artist work. At that point, there were only two other artists on the hashtag #artistsupportpledge. So I purchased two pieces from one artist. My phone was going bonkers by the next day, nonstop messaging coming through, two messages, a second nonstop, 24 hours a day, bing, bing, bing, you know, with notifications. A lot of those messages said something along the lines of this is a great idea; I’m going to do it. So I knew, even though there were only two other people on the hashtag at that point, that it was going to work.
It was another 24 hours before people started posting because they had to get everything ready. Select the work, photograph it, get their head around it, and start posting. So then, I created the red tile and the text panel and emailed that to my network of friends and posted it on the Instagram account and said, please repost it, post it online and repost it and keep reposting it. That was on the second day, which was the first full day. By that evening, it was nonstop and went on like that for months. I remember putting my brushes down at midday to create that red tile, thinking I was coming back to the studio to paint. I never even came to clean the brushes. I remember thinking, all right, if I have to work on this nonstop for the next three months, so be it. If it completely trashes me, that’s all right; I’ll take time off at the end. My big worry was that the postal service would stop. We were in lockdown, and if the postal service stopped, that’s the end of it. Luckily the postal service was named a key business.
I’d set #artistsupportpledge in motion, and I had to run with it. There were days when I was doing five or six interviews, from one to the next. And they were worldwide; some of them were in the middle of the night. If I managed to do 18 hours, that was a short day. And then I would crash because I was so tired. Then I’d get up again and carry on. It was utterly crazy.
I learned to understand that like any social movement, you need it to sustain a strong public profile; but maybe more importantly, you’ve got to inform people what its values are and how to manifest those values for the good of its community. There isn’t one way of doing that. The formula I’d come up with works, so I honour that and maintain it. And I keep people informed as to why they should follow the guidelines for sales, because, an obvious thing people might think is well: I’ve sold five pieces, why should I buy anybody else’s when I need the money? It’s understandable, that generous cultures have existed for hundreds of thousands of years. They rely on trust. Yet they are the most sustainable cultures in human history. We have a capitalist culture, which makes a few people very wealthy at the expense of many people. The whole point of a generous culture is that you look out for the good of the community. It has a knock-on effect on everybody.
Reinvention of anything is really key. As we moved from lockdowns to the real world, I realised the needs of the artistic community and buyers were shifting. The idea for new hybrid projects like the A Generous Space Exhibition at Hastings Contemporary grew from that. Walsall New Art Gallery is next.
Artist Support Pledge tiles. www.artistsupportpledge.com
Matthew Burrows was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s 2020 Birthday Honours List. Matthew received the award for his service to the arts during the COVID-19 pandemic, for his creation of the Artist Support Pledge.
Extended interview - This part of the interview was not printed in RyeZine 3.
Starting and committing to this project must have significantly affected your life via time and money; how do you keep that in check?
Matthew. I justified the first year or so by saying if I could sell enough work through the Artist Support Pledge to pay for it, then that’s fine. That was my logic at the beginning, it did mean a burden on me, and there were moments when I thought this was just too much of responsibility for me to carry. But then I thought this is a manifestation of everything you believe in, so just do it. I’d made that decision not to go down the commercial route. So I had to find a way of sustaining the movement. So funding was the apparent answer: getting sponsorship, funding, donations, and the rest of it. So we get donations from artists on the pledge, not massive amounts. But I mean, the significant expense is paying for staff, you add up wages, and it soon gets up there. So we are working with AN, Artist Newsletter, The Artist Information Company; they are an artist membership organisation. And we are partnering up; they’re going to help me with the funding, they’ve been part-funding the Artist Support Pledge for the last few months, payments towards staffing, which has been a massive weight off my mind.
Balancing out that with being a full-time artist, you know, that’s how I make my money, and the Artist Support Pledge is something I do on the side. But it became like two full-time jobs drawn into one and then having to be an artist. I had to make a living all the way through. So it wasn’t as if, I could just stop being an artist. That was tricky. But, this is one of those times in your life where you have just got to go for it and not count the cost. Now, it is much more realistic; it’s too bad; it’s at a point where I can enjoy the combination of things. If this is the only thing I ever do in my life, I’ve done more than I could ever have dreamt of.
“I put as much effort into my work that goes on the pledge as I do in anything else. Even if it is for substantially less money than my other work, but I don’t put less effort into it; to me, it is just as important.”
It has slowed down, and you have to work a bit harder now selling the stuff, but it’s still very much alive.