ARTIST FEATURE - SAMUEL BURGESS
- Mar 15
- 2 min read
ARTIST | FEATURE
SAMUEL BURGESS
Samuel Burgess is a self-taught artist based in London with a practice shared between oil painting and works in graphite. His work captures forgotten or everyday scenes, narratives in lived-in places. Within his familiar landscapes, there is something of a sense of the uncanny or otherworldly; beautiful, intricate and detailed, and slightly unsettling.
Samuel's oil paintings of urban scenes are highly detailed, with deep attention paid to rendering textures, surfaces, and light, but without straying into photorealism – his unique style creating believable but visibly painterly works with quirky passages in the details. The spaces are very real, readable, known, but often using the viewpoint or the presence of something unexpected, or even the lack of something, he creates an almost eerie, disjointed reality, provoking questions in the viewer and enticing deeper looking.
His colour palettes are earthy and deeply rooted in urban reality. His focus is on recreating the environment around him, using truthful colours to depict his world; he does not stray into impressionistic additions or embellished bright colours.
His graphite works have a more stylised finish, yet hold the same truths of life and place and are imbued with a similar sense of an unsettling frozen moment. The details he captures in trees and brickwork echo the hand shown in his oil paintings, a perfect duo of styles within one practice.
These graphite works are quiet, they are stolen or forgotten moments with suggestions of life unseen. Each scene is well observed, recognisable everyday life. The use of monochrome allows Samuel to play with light and shade, tone and texture without the interruption of colour. He keeps things soft, subtle, no harsh contrast here, but balanced in grey. It gives a sense of the dreamlike, of a fleeting second delicately caught under the graphite.
Discover more of Samuels' work over on his portfolio – and find links to his website to purchase originals and prints. To see his work in real life, visit our Small Works exhibition at the end of the month!
Comments