Breathing Light
SKU:
£295.00
£295.00
per item
Oil painting on wood panel.
20x20cm
Mounted in a white " St Ives" style frame 35x35cm
“In Breathing Light, Ray Burnell seems less to paint a forest than to listen to one. The vertical drifts of black, silver and deep green descend like rain-soaked trunks or curtains of moss, yet the image resists settling into certainty. It hovers between woodland, water, and memory. The eye moves downward through the painting as though entering a place where light itself is slowly dissolving into earth.
The green above is dense, almost respiratory in its movement — a canopy inhaling darkness and exhaling luminosity. Beneath it, pale veils of white and silver seep through the blackened forms like hidden streams or winter light breaking through wet trees. Burnell’s fluid surfaces and cellular textures create the sensation that the painting is alive, growing while we look at it. There is something geological here, but also biological: bark, lichen, roots, rain, breath.
What makes the work compelling is its refusal to become merely decorative abstraction. The painting carries atmosphere in the true Romantic sense — a mood of solitude, immersion, and slight unease. The darker verticals stand like silent witnesses inside the green torrent above them, while the luminous lower passages suggest a kind of emergence, as though light is not falling onto the landscape but rising from within it.
The title Breathing Light is exactly right. This is not light as illumination, but light as organism — damp, pulsing, inhaled through leaves and mist. Burnell transforms the Welsh landscape into something almost sentient: a living weather system of shadow, moisture and phosphorescent green.”
Ray Burnell’s work is often rooted in the atmospheric landscapes of West Wales and his fascination with fleeting light and texture.
20x20cm
Mounted in a white " St Ives" style frame 35x35cm
“In Breathing Light, Ray Burnell seems less to paint a forest than to listen to one. The vertical drifts of black, silver and deep green descend like rain-soaked trunks or curtains of moss, yet the image resists settling into certainty. It hovers between woodland, water, and memory. The eye moves downward through the painting as though entering a place where light itself is slowly dissolving into earth.
The green above is dense, almost respiratory in its movement — a canopy inhaling darkness and exhaling luminosity. Beneath it, pale veils of white and silver seep through the blackened forms like hidden streams or winter light breaking through wet trees. Burnell’s fluid surfaces and cellular textures create the sensation that the painting is alive, growing while we look at it. There is something geological here, but also biological: bark, lichen, roots, rain, breath.
What makes the work compelling is its refusal to become merely decorative abstraction. The painting carries atmosphere in the true Romantic sense — a mood of solitude, immersion, and slight unease. The darker verticals stand like silent witnesses inside the green torrent above them, while the luminous lower passages suggest a kind of emergence, as though light is not falling onto the landscape but rising from within it.
The title Breathing Light is exactly right. This is not light as illumination, but light as organism — damp, pulsing, inhaled through leaves and mist. Burnell transforms the Welsh landscape into something almost sentient: a living weather system of shadow, moisture and phosphorescent green.”
Ray Burnell’s work is often rooted in the atmospheric landscapes of West Wales and his fascination with fleeting light and texture.
