Industrial Landscape

Discussing Burra's productive 'last phase', Angus Stewart (exhibition catalogue, Edward Burra, London, Olympia, 2001, p. vi) comments, 'During his last years Burra became more playful, carefree and flippant, though still careful that his technical performance should be meticulous. He painted landscapes that rolled across the paper like the waves of sound in a pastoral symphony. There is in these works an absurd reduction of fact, allied to an active subterranean distortion. Nothing is as it was, but all is as it should be. Here, the painter's artistry creates its own truth. Burra's humour tipped and spluttered, unseating natural phenomena, giving it a fresh impetus, and, by implication, rebuking those who see the land as passive'.