Xanthe Burdett: Portraits Where the Figure and the Foliage Are the Same Thing

The Devon-born, London-based painter works almost entirely in greens, layering leaves and vines over faint figurative silhouettes until the boundary between person and plant stops holding. Burdett builds the paintings using the Renaissance cartoon method — charcoal laid between a preparatory drawing and the canvas, the linework traced through — which gives the figures their slightly unearthed quality. Mythology and older cosmologies sit underneath the work: not people in nature, but people as nature.

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