Internal Landscape V: Crowsley Park Print

Charles Burns began his career as a street artist. He worked for 12 years at London’s Covent Garden market, drawing 10-minute pencil portraits for tourists and Londoners alike. Charles made this choice out of a profound feeling that he was unemployable. Describing himself as “one of nature’s natural self employed,” he felt that he was constitutionally incapable of handling the social pressures of a more conventional work environment. Whilst in Covent Garden, Charles taught himself the lost art of the silhouettist: the art of cutting black-paper, profile portraits freehand with scissors. He did this by visiting the National Portrait Gallery, on rainy days, and obsessively copying the silhouettes in their collection, until he mastered the technique and began cutting them on the street. Seeing his silhouettes, people began booking him for parties and events. Soon, silhouettes started to take over his life. In his early 40s, Charles was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome – a form of autism – an event which he describes as surprisingly empowering. It gave him a new direction, answering many questions about his childhood development and about his feeling of being unemployable. He embarked on a program of self improvement in order to develop his career as a silhouettist. Today, Charles cuts portraits at events all over the world and many celebrities have posed for him, including the Queen. He has written a book, Mastering Silhouettes, made a film, Silhouette Secrets, and used silhouettes in a wide variety of artistic projects, a process he calls Adventures in Silhouette. “Silhouettes seem like such a tiny niche in the world of art, yet for me this seemingly-simple craft has expanded to take over my entire world. It has taken me in directions I never could have imagined or planned when I first picked up a pair of scissors” Silhouette portraits were very popular in the eighteenth & nineteenth centuries, and artists employed a wide range of media in making them. Some artists cut them, while others painted them onto paper, ivory, plaster or glass. Some created plain black “shades”, while others included touches of gold and colour in their profiles. Some worked freehand, while others used a wide variety of charmingly idiosyncratic equipment: from the camera obscura, to the physiognotrace and the supposedly-automatic prosopographus.