Day 94/100: Matthew Burrows MBE
Encouraging a UK Painter Who Made a Global Impact on the Art World Under Lockdown
Today, as part of my 100 Days of Encouragement Project, I’m celebrating Matthew Burrows — a painter based in East Sussex, UK, whose instinct for promoting generous culture during the COVID-19 pandemic continues to bless artists and collectors around the world. As part of the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2020, he was made a Member of the chivalrous Order of the British Empire for his contributions to the arts.
Born in the Wirral Peninsula in the northwest of England in 1971, Matthew was raised in an artistic family. Though his dad earned his living as a graphic designer, he was a painter at heart. His mother was an art teacher. So, he grew up surrounded by art, with lots of materials at hand, and the support and encouragement from his parents to explore. He says he spent most of his childhood drawing and making things.
He went to a school specializing in art in Cheshire, which offered residential art courses abroad for students between the ages of 16 and leaving A-levels. This opportunity for international study was a turning point for Matthew. He explored many mediums and felt that he had found the thing he was meant to do when he was given the chance to create large paintings. The experience boosted his confidence and ignited his ambition. He knew that painting and making things gave him a level of happiness and groundedness that was essential.
He did a foundation course in Chester before studying at the Birmingham School of Art, where he received a BFA specializing in painting. From there, he went to the Royal College in London and got an MA in painting. The contrast in those experiences would become a vital part of Matthew’s philosophy of art and economics.
He observes that he came out of his BA, knowing that he had done his best and feeling confident. In contrast, graduating with his MA left him feeling flat. Though he was exhibiting in galleries in London and New York and supporting himself as a professional artist – which most people considered success — he wasn’t comfortable or thriving internally. He loved painting, but his early success felt like a trap. Galleries were selling his work, but he didn’t know how to exercise the freedom to continue evolving in his style and artistic vision.
He found his way back to his creative joy after a year-long scholarship in the US, a part-time teaching job as a senior lecturer in drawing and painting at the University of Huddersfield, and a residency at Gloucester Cathedral for the millennium academic year, which gave him focused time where he didn’t have to do anything other than make art. Through these experiences, he learned that he could create his own rules, that he had the confidence to start over, and that he was drawn to the dance between simplicity and complexity.
Today, his paintings are reflective and thoughtful, built off a complex structural space of lines, shapes and color. Though the actual process of painting for Matthew is full of immediacy and responsiveness to marks and materials, he is aware that what is coming out of him is inextricably related to his experiences. He speaks of painting as a form of subsistence, dependent on and arising from the ground at his feet. He sees his relationship with place as one of dwelling and ritual, accessed poetically to evoke meaning from the particularities of the environment and his movement in and through it.
This movement through the landscape is both metaphor and reality for Matthew. As a long-distance runner, he has discovered that his treks through rough wilderness and difficult terrains have brought him face-to-face not only with nature’s wildness, but also the wildness of his own soul. He also noticed that the way he runs across a landscape is like how he draws, moving his pencil around a piece of paper. Matthew observes:
“There is a saying that mystics use; the way you do anything is the way you do everything.”
To manifest the same sense of self in everything he does is Matthew’s ultimate goal. He believes that culture is about our relationship to being part of nature, rather than being separate from it. And that sense of unity is what he is working out in his paintings.
Though they are typically described as abstracts, he thinks of his works as paintings of a landscape—not in a classical, literal sense, but as patterns that are ideated from nature. In this way, he (counterintuitively) thinks of himself as a realist painter. But the reality he is capturing is not a mere reproduction of a visual experience. It may be phenomenological (wind, rain, currents) or ideological (the path a river takes is the one of least resistance, but not necessarily the most efficient route).
The lines in his paintings could be perceived as allusions to topographical maps of a geographic place or lines on the human face – and this paradox somehow captures the relationship between the structure of ourselves and the structure of a landscape that he sees as an essential awakening for us humans, inviting us to becoming better stewards of the environment because we are inseparable from it.
Prior to March 2020, I am sad to say that I had never heard of Matthew Burrows (though he had been a prolific, established painter for almost 30 years). But the day after the UK COVID lockdown began, he posted an idea on Instagram that went global within 24 hours – the Artist Support Pledge hashtag & commitment.
As COVID threats were escalating, Matthew was hearing artists saying that their shows and art fairs weren’t happening, their classes were cancelled, their galleries were curtailing or eliminating hours, and their opportunities to make a living were being shuttered. He wanted to do something. And when he assessed his assets, he concluded that he had two things – a culture of trust and generosity that he had been developing for about a dozen years and his artwork. Based on principles of a subsistence culture, Matthew proposed an idea:
Make artwork that costs no more than £200 and post an image on social media with the hashtag #artistsupportpledge. Sell directly to buyers. When you have sold £1,000 worth of your artwork, “pay it forward” by buying a £200 piece from another artist.
He posted (now iconic) red graphics to help promote and explain the concept.
Within a day or two I was seeing red Artist Support Pledge posts all over my Instagram feed. At first, I thought it was limited to UK artists. But I started to see US artists translating the £200 “target” to $200. And EU artists at 200EU, Canadian artists at $300CAD, Australian artists at $300AU, and so on in currency after currency.
I was captivated and committed. I still am. When we sell any of our daily paintings or artwork priced $200 or less, those sales count toward our ASP commitment.
In 2020 and 2021, we not only sold a shocking (for us) number of paintings – often to collectors who were buying original art for the first time – but we also got the chance to purchase art from artists whose work was normally out of our price range. We collected art from artists in the UK, Canada, South Africa, France, Germany, and Australia, as well as US artists.
In an otherwise bleak season of human history, we were buoyed with hope and showered with beautiful artwork. We made new friends. We found new sources of inspiration. And best of all, we knew we were part of a generous movement that was helping to sustain the arts and elevate the idea that beauty will save the world. We were combatting fear and misinformation with art and good-heartedness. We felt like we were actually doing something powerful in a time when powerlessness was swirling around us.
Our story is just one of thousands of responses Matthew (and the support team he quickly had to assemble to deal with the initiative’s success) received from artists and buyers. To date, there have been over 784,000 ASP posts, some representing up to 10 pieces of artwork. Artists of every genre, style, and level of experience have joined to create a network of support and economic vitality.
As galleries, exhibitions, classes and shows have reopened, sales have slowed down through the ASP process. But not stopped. The initiative continues to bring opportunity, awareness, empowerment, and a sense of belonging to artists and art-lovers around the globe.
And we have the vision of one man — willing to step out in faith that artists would come together to overcome a sense of scarcity, and through a system of honor and trust, create a generous culture — to thank for this phenomenon.
How You Be an Encouragement
Please check out Matthew’s offerings on Instagram, follow him, and send him some encouragement today by commenting on one of his posts or sending him a direct message.