Ed Burkes

Ed Burkes' work centres on the pursuit of feeling: the subtle, intangible terrain that painting can hold without needing to name it. During a recent residency in the South of France, he painted exclusively from observation, working outdoors at the easel. This slower way of looking, gathering fragments over time, gave him anchors he carried back into the studio, where they continue to register not as literal scenes but as emotional residues.

The process has brought a new clarity to his practice, in which resolution comes from listening to what each painting asks for. Burkes likens painting to holding a torch up in a dark cave, where sustained attention slowly reveals hidden textures and forms. His work arrives at truth through possibility rather than certainty, in the moment feeling becomes form. It is a quiet confrontation with our shared mortality, and with the threads that bind us to one another.

Burkes graduated in Fine Art from Falmouth in 2016, the year he received the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Travel to Italy Award. In 2019 he was named the eighth winner of the Jonathan Vickers Fine Art Award, a nine-month residency in Derbyshire that culminated in Dandelion, a solo exhibition at Derby Museum and Art Gallery (2020–21), touring to Mall Galleries, London, in 2021. His work is held in private collections worldwide.

Studio: Cornwall, UK