email:  art@charlesburns.co.uk

website:  www.charlesburns.co.uk

After graduating with a fine art degree from Wolverhampton Art College – and feeling unsuited to the rigours of a “real job” – Charles set out to earn a living as a street portrait artist in London’s Covent Garden. This he did successfully for nearly twelve years.

As well as drawing portraits in pencil, he used this open-air, street-art studio to teach himself the art of cutting silhouette portraits with scissors. At the time this seemed like a completely lost art. Unexpectedly, these silhouettes took over his life and became a full-time business. For many years Charles has been much in demand as a silhouettist, appearing at corporate and private events all over the UK and overseas. He three times cut portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, as well asof many other notable figures of our times.

Charles has written a book about silhouettes, Mastering Silhouettes, presented the award-winning documentary film Silhouette Secrets, and presented his TEDx talk The Eighteenth-Century Selfie, all of which are available to view.

In his studio work Charles explores the interface between the low-brow art of the silhouette portrait and the high-brow world of fine art in which he trained. He does this by creating silhouettes using a wide variety of materials and techniques, as well as by using the traditional tools of the silhouettist (a pair of sharp scissors) as a drawing tool. By combining drawing and cutting media in unexpected ways he hopes to both clarify his own long-standing relationship to the act of drawing and to further explore the mark-making capabilities of scissors.

For inspiration, Charles looks to a huge collection of antique silhouettes which he has assembled over many years. Silhouettes became popular in England in the 1760s, but the primary focus of the collection is the work of street silhouettists working all over Europe in the early 1900s and during the inter-war period. As an artist, Charles assiduously mines this collection for ideas, inspiration and subject matter.

Charles is based in Reading and opens his studio to the pubic once a year as part of the Caversham Arts Trail. He is a full member of the Reading Guild of Artists, the London Sketch Club and SGFA. Information about events and exhibitions can be found by visiting his website and signing up to his newsletter.