COASTAL
With the popular Staithes Festival of Arts and Heritage making a welcome return after a four-year absence, we look at what’s in-store and talk to local painter and printmaker Ian Burke, formerly drawing master at Eton College
There can’t be many people who look at a scrappy piece of lino with a hole in it where a toilet plinth once sat, and thought: ‘I can use that’.
Yet that is exactly what Saltburn-born artist Ian Burke did when he was forging his artistic career.
Having been brought up in Redcar, Ian was destined to work in one of Teesside’s heavy industries. He’d actually started out as an apprentice metal fitter before his mother persuaded him to take his A levels, much to the fury of his father who was away at sea at the time. It was then that Ian discovered his love of art. ‘My Dad, an oil-rig worker, was pretty disgruntled at first that his son wanted to be an artist,’ he recalls. ‘I couldn’t afford a studio or painting equipment and so I turned to traditional printmaking, scouring skips for pieces of old lino and wood that I could use to make the printing blocks. ‘In fact I used the toilet floor lino to make a carving of the Redcar beach tractors that I included in my portfolio to gain a place at Goldsmiths Art College in London.’
He might have spent decades working away but Ian, who went into art teaching after leaving Goldsmiths, including a spell at Rugby School and 20 years as Eton College’s drawing master, has never deserted his roots.
He did once toy with the idea of moving to Suffolk or Cornwall. However the reaction from locals down there convinced him he’d get a warmer response from those living in Staithes where his northeast dialect, together with the fact that his uncle once owned the Captain Cook Inn, gave him an advantage.
And so, having bought a cottage in Staithes, he began the lengthy commute, spending the weekdays teaching in Windsor before retreating back to the coast for the weekend.
He explains: ‘It felt like you were a bit of a missionary, helping to spread the word that it wasn’t all grim up north. As well as using locations in the North York Moors National Park and Teesside as subjects to illustrate drawing techniques, we organised a number of art trips for pupils where we showed them Tees and Redcar beach, warts and all, and they loved it!’
Having moved from Staithes out to a converted mill near Lealholm he continued working at Eton.
During lockdown he held lessons via Zoom and found that the North York Moors was a classroom offering plenty of teaching inspiration – whether it was farmers mowing hay or noticing foxgloves coming into flower.
Since retirin
