Karl Bourke is a painter, printmaker, creative director and. educator. As a painter he has work in both public and private collections in Europe and the United States. As a creative director he has been employed by some of the media’s leading brands. He has taught drawing, painting, printmaking and design in both public and private institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Select Works
Painting
Drawing
My principle concern as a painter is with the observed world and its translation onto the two-dimensional surface. I am committed to working directly from life with a principle focus on portraits, still-life, and landscape. The paintings are made by taking careful, comparative measurements from the subject matter at arms-length, equidistant from the eye. This approach finds its origins in the politically-conscious, social realist work of The Euston Road School and English painters, active in London in the late 1930s. The objective documentation of seeing and the act of mark-making become a single, celebratory operation of observation to create an authentic image of our observed world.
