"His torturers, his bullies, his soldiers, some of his phantasmagoria are evil, but many of his creatures are simply louche and disreputable. He loved naughtiness. He enjoyed depravity and bathed it in a glamorous light. He was acquainted with imps as well as demons."
Drawn from Burra’s amazingly fertile imagination, when one looks at Birds one feels as though we are witnessing a dream, or have been submitted to some form of hallucinogenic agent. What is actually happening in the scene remains unclear- the demonic like central figures, birds, man and machine morphed together as one, are the overriding presence; their otherworldly, cat-like eyes glaring outwards. Other figural elements emerge from the burnt and blistered landscape. Despite the pervading sense of darkness, Burra cannot help but also include the shapely physique of one of his adored dancers, muscular legs with feet en-pointe, emerging from the half man/ half beast in the foreground. The colours are intensely vivid, saturated and extreme- they diffuse into one another, the creature on the wagon becoming lost to the moonlit sky behind. Painted between 1950-2, the execution of Birds contrasts with Burra’s earlier works, which are painted tightly, with a matte finish and opaqueness, feeling similar in many ways to tempera. Here Burra uses the watercolour medium to an entirely different effect- he utilizes the swirling diffusion, the blurring of boundaries, to encourage the prevailing sense of the uncanny and strange.
Burra had long been fascinated by the macabre and the bizarre, and these elements appear continually throughout his career, from the dancing skeletons of the 1930s, all the way through to the menacing presences we find in his English landscapes of the 1950s and 60s. As is often the case with Burra, he did not elaborate on his beliefs, but it is clear he was fascinated by the idea of spirits, in the imperceptible sense of the supernatural. He drew inspiration from gothic novels which he loved, and as Jane Stevenson points out in her biography on the artist, he owned several books which focused on the existence of the occult, witchcraft and magic.
In 1937 William Gaunt published Bandits in a Landscape, on painters from Caravaggio to Delacroix. Burra spent a great deal of t.mes studying these artists and may well have owned a copy. Gaunt suggests that the painters he studies were expressing a kind of despair at human achievement. The same may well be true of Burra. The Spanish Civil War horrified him and the outbreak of the Second World War confirmed his despair. William Chappell, a lifelong friend of the Artist, wrote of his personality:
"… his nature was full of barriers and barricades. Those who were fairly intimate with him learnt never to attempt to overthrow them. Anything he felt strongly about such as his work – he would not discuss."
In Burra’s work, however, he has left an autobiography. Burra’s paintings from the late 1930s to early 1950s are suffused with grief, terror and a struggle to surmount desolation. So, while Burra might have been tight-lipped, his brush spoke volumes. And while various sources provided Burra with fertile grounds for inspiration, it is truly his unique vision and mix of darkness with the comic which produces such powerful and intriguing characters, such as those we see in Birds.