My practice extends beyond the studio and includes conversation, mentoring, teaching, and shared experiences around painting, landscape, attention, and the creative life
Over the years I’ve come to see art not simply as the production of objects, but as a way of being in relationship with the world – through looking, making, movement, dialogue, and reflection.
The events and conversations below are intended to create spaces for this kind of attention and exchange: intimate, thoughtful, and grounded in lived experience.
Studio Conversations are small online group sessions for artists who want to reflect more deeply on their practice and the conditions that support it.
These sessions combine discussion, reflection, practical insight, and conversation around subjects such as studio practice, sustaining a creative life, attention, process, failure, ambition, rhythm, and artistic identity.
Rather than offering fixed formulas, the aim is to create a supportive space where artists can think more clearly about who they are, what matters to them, and how they want to work.
These talks are led from the perspective of a practicing painter and are based around close looking and shared reflection in front of individual works of art.
Having lectured at the National Gallery, London for over twenty years, I’m interested in how painters actually experience paintings: how images are constructed, how attention moves across a surface, and how meaning emerges through material, gesture, colour, rhythm, and time.
These are not traditional art history lectures, but slower conversations about perception, painting, and the experience of looking.
Studio Gatherings are occasional small-scale events held in my studio in East Sussex.
Set within the landscape that surrounds my practice, these gatherings bring together conversation, painting, food, and shared time around the studio environment itself.
They may include informal talks, discussions about painting and process, studio visits, lunches, or seasonal gatherings centred around art, landscape, and creative life.
The emphasis is on hospitality, openness, and creating meaningful spaces for connection and exchange.
Matthew Burrows MBE 