Born in the last year of the Second World War, Colin Burns grew up in a small terraced street in a seaside resort town, having the time of his life with 50 other children who all lived in the same street. However, from the age of 7 he still found time, about once a week, to paint landscapes and the sunset, and as a 9-year-old started winning art prizes at school.
When he was 12 he received the greatest culture shock of his life when his parents whisked him off to live in the middle of the country in a marshland farmhouse. Suddenly the bright lights and funfairs of town life were out of reach; their place was taken by bleak but beautiful surroundings and the local wildlife. Colin Burns claims that this change of life style was the greatest artistic influence he has experienced. He became more and more involved in painting and began observing the wonders of nature.
At the age of 16 Burns left school and qualified as an accountant. All through this time he was still painting in great earnest and had begun to sell his images locally. Finally, in 1976 he took some oil paintings to a prestigious London gallery which mounted his first exhibition in 1977.
Since 1978, Colin Burns has lived totally by his brush, painting with increasing success and fluency in both oil and water-colour. He is a landscape specialist, concentrating on the East Anglian countryside and the birds that inhabit it. He and his wife and son are keen naturalists and spend many hours wandering around their lovely local beauty spots. Colin Burns will always sketch as he walks and take photographs as reference material, never however painting directly from them. He has what he describes as photographic eyes, so that once he sees an image it is imprinted firmly on his mind and he can go back to his studio and build it up from the briefest sketch.
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