Sea Mine with Oil Lamp

	Artist: William A Burns
	Title: Sea Mine with Oil Lamp
	Year: c. 1972
	Medium: oil on board
	Dimensions:
	Suggested topic: built environment
	Source: RSA Diploma Collection
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Description: William Burns used his environment as a starting point and explored abstraction and colour as a means of expression.Burns' early landscape paintings gave way to harbour scenes but then, as a light aircraft pilot, he began exploring the mines along the east coast of Scotland using the benefit of an aerial view as his inspiration. This painting, Sea Mine with Oil Lamp, has references to winding gear and other industrial equipment, but they have been fused together with rich colours and strong, painterly textures to create a near-abstract painting. Solid, bold, shapes and a powerful palette take this painting far away from a conventional image of a mine. As well as the aerial view, Burns seems to show us a cross-section through the earth, allowing us to see lift-shafts and machinery. The crimson shapes within the central panel could represent faces of miners, or they could symbolise the burning heat of the mine shaft deep underground. He has taken elements of a mine which inspired him to create the painting, but he has progressed with this idea and freely evolved it to create this imaginative work.The painting has been executed in a scratchy, scribbly style. There is a lot of freedom and energy in the marks applied to the canvas with paint, but also the marks scraped into the paint itself. The palette is very luscious and vibrant, with a strong emphasis on warm reds, pinks and browns, but with a dramatic tonal contrast in the black and white areas. There is a lot of texture in the scoured surface of this painting, unlike more traditional paintings where the surface remains intact. Have you ever tried working on the surface of a drawing or painting to alter its surface qualities?