Bourner, Guy

Over the past 7 years I have been making various types of paintings and experimentations, and since graduating in 2005 and have been focusing on simplifying a group of paintings in my studio in London. All of them are based on the premise that paint is better wet than dry; a common assumption of painting is that you paint a picture and the paint should dry. I have always seemed to want to challenge this assumption. I have always been interested in the process of a painting and the life of paint, from its state in a tube or can, to its mark onto a surface. I am not interested in re-inventing painting but like to look at what has been and what I can do that might be different. All my paintings begin with a drawing and I see this as a very important process which helps me to free my mind of ideas. In the studio I try to have as few rules as possible, I think more like the type of work I don’t want to make and start from there. I believe that the fewer the rules I have the more ideas and accidents I encourage. I think everyone and everything can be vulnerable and my paintings are no different. I try to give them an element of fear and caution. I have always wanted to have the idea that a painting can live on - literally. That it can move with us, at the same speed. It can change its mind, change direction, disappear, live and die all at once.

Description of Current Paintings

The Velvet painting is the only type of painting which I make which could be seen as a contradiction of what im talking about. It comes from the in-between part of the making and the finish line of a painting. The disregarded spills, and drips are often forgotten and left behind, the refuse drowning the studio floor. I recreate these fragments of paint from my own studio floor and delicately position them onto black velvet supports. Sitting behind glass they represent the history of an unobserved painting world and the history of my own methods. My Trough paintings have evolved from the making of ‘It always fells like Im waiting for something to happen’. To the viewer these paintings are a performance, but to me a painting. A mass dumping of wet paint they are brazenly alive. In the ‘Blue and Orange Striped Painting’ I have arranged four people to pour the paint from one trough to another, creating individual ‘curtains of paint’ they form one painting. Each curtain in my eyes creates a sudden ever changing landscape of colour. I really wanted to make a painting that doesn’t live on, but lives. The Floor Painting consists of 225 Litres of Household Emulsion poured on to a floor with a polythene sheet laid on top. The viewer is asked to take there shoes off and walk on to the paint. Using two different emulsions a pink and a white, the viewer is given an opportunity to create using there footprint. They are forced to look at the painting because they are standing on it, they have no choice. The feedback from this work was very positive and is a project which I would really like to develop. The Container Painting is a recent experiment and one which I hope to develop. Consisting of a 3cms deep Glass Container, it is filled with 5 litres of gloss paint. With no lid to the container the gloss paint seals itself and forms a skin. The painting is vulnerable; it is ‘Popable’. The painting is alive, pop the skin of the paint and pour away to empty the painting.

Contact details
Mr  Guy  Bourner
46 Grimthorpe House
Percival Street
London
ec1v 0bs
07881910062
glbourner@yahoo.co.uk

Primary Art Form
Visual Arts and Designer Makers

Other Artform categories
Performance Art
Installation
Lighting
Painter / 2D
Visual Arts