Brendan Stuart Burns
Eisteddfod winning Artist
Brendan Stuart Burns was born in 1963 in Nakuru, Kenya. A claim on this site's previous listing that he was 'born of Welsh and Irish parents' could not be independently verified in any professional biography of his work, so it is not repeated here as fact — what is well documented is a genuine, decades-long career built in Wales. He studied Fine Art at Cardiff College of Art from 1981 to 1985, gaining a first-class degree, before completing postgraduate painting studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1985 to 1987.
Burns went on to win the Gold Medal in Fine Art at the National Eisteddfod of Wales twice, at Llanelwedd in 1993 and at Bro Ogwr in 1998, and was named Welsh Artist of the Year in both 2000 and 2003. In 1991 he was artist-in-residence at the Llanfrechfa Grange Mental Health Unit in Cwmbran, and from 1994 he taught at the Glamorgan Centre of Art and Design Technology, later earning a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Glamorgan.
His work is rooted in the landscape and ecology of the Pembrokeshire coast, producing intimate, richly textured studies of lichen-covered rock, mud pools, sand, tidal water and coastal light. His paintings have been exhibited at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff and Newport Museum and Art Gallery, among many other galleries in Britain and abroad.