As an artist who paints street life and cityscapes, it makes sense that Trevor Burgess lives in a very urban location. His home, in south London, is an old builder’s yard, sandwiched between a busy railway line and the backs of Victorian terraces. Except that it’s also a bit of a rustic hideaway, too. A sliver of track-side meadow lies opposite and the unmade path that leads to his front door is dotted with wild flowers and waist-high grasses. “Nobody can find this place – even our post often goes to a house in the next street,” says Burgess.
The building was derelict when Burgess and his wife, landscape architect Andrea Dates, bought it. “It was in a terrible state – stacked with rotten timbers and piles of old pipes,” he says. Cement had been poured over what has been made into their back garden. They had the cement broken up and removed, chunk by huge chunk, and then they sifted through years of detritus beneath. Some of the prettier spoils – cloudy glass bottles, sections of slate and the odd rusted cog – are now displayed around their home.
Larger-scale reminders of the building’s previous life remain, too, from municipal door handles to windows with safety glass crisscrossed with wire. The brick wall above the cooker is made from pitted and crumbled London bricks, while other sections of the building are shored up with more prosaic breeze block, patched up with whatever was to hand at the time. The couple’s bathroom was once the builder’s office, with a small hatch where workmen collected their wages. “We filled in the opening and it’s now a useful set of shelves,” says Burgess.
Other jobs included fixing sheets of ply to the pitched ceiling and adding some internal windows, using corrugated polycarbonate. “It’s lightweight, insulates well and is easy to cut,” explains Burgess, who also made all the wooden shelves and the kitchen units, incorporating a pair of decorative 1940s drawers into his kitchen build.
But all of the couple’s alterations were born of necessity, rather than in pursuit of any “reclaimed” aesthetic. “Originality was forced upon us because of our limited budget,” says Burgess. “But it was never our intention to turn this space into a pristine white cube.” Colour is a big part of the couple’s style, with vibrant paint shades inspired by travels to India and Latin America – Andrea is Argentinian so they frequently visit her family there and have travelled around the region.
Urban life is a mainstay of Burgess’s art work, from anonymous London flats painted from estate agents’ listings to children playing in the fountains of Granary Square in King’s Cross. Then there are paintings of markets, depicting fruit and veg sellers in Dalston and a stall piled high with flip-flops, in Pune, India. “Markets are part of why cities exist,” he says. “It’s how they developed as trading centres and, in most cities, markets are still a hub of city life.”
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
