"The Daily Mail" - June 2003

Gerard Burns describes himself as a traditional painter and says he's fed up with artists who put a white tick on a huge canvas and call it art, or think that an unmade bed, a light switch or a dismembered shark are acceptable modern abstracts. "I paint real people, real scenes, real life," he says. "It's hopelessly old-fashioned in some artists' eyes, but most of what is called contemporary art is self-indulgent and trivial. However, I've plodded on because I still believe there is a hunger for art that everyone can understand and relate to."

Gerard's determination to do it his way has paid off, for his painting of a young girl leading a white bull has made him the winner of our £20,000 first prize in our NOT the Turner Prize competition. All the judges agreed that his work 'The Labyrinth' is a brave and impressive painting that instantly captures the imagination.

Gerard, 41, works from his studio, a cross between a summer house and a garden shed, at the back of his home in Cumbernauld, near Glasgow. Married with three sons, aged 14, 12 and nine, he has been a pop singer and songwriter, as well as a teacher, before, he jokes, "I gave it up to risk full-time poverty and starvation as an artist."

Now he says, "If you'd asked me when I was nine what I wanted to do I might have said I wanted to be an artist, because I've been painting since I was a toddler. But it wasn't a real ambition.It was like a child saying he wants to be a pop star or an astronaut."

Instead, he went off to spend a year at university studying civil engineering, which he hated, and then enrolled at Glasgow School of Art. It was there that his taste for figurative art began to clash with the tastes of the contemporary-art world. "I was totally out of fashion in their eyes, because they seemed to hate anything recognisable with any form, so life wasn't easy. By the time I'd got to the fourth year, I let them think they had beaten me into submission, so I made massive abstract pieces in sand.

"Once I put a single brush stroke across a big oatmeal canvas that I was supposed to be priming, and I thought, 'OK, I can go home now - it's finished.' That was the moment I realised I was in danger of forgetting what real art is. I left art school disillusioned and, for the first time in my life, stopped painting."

Gerard began singing and playing guitar in a band called Valerie and the Week of Wonders. They had a recording contract and supported some of the best-known bands of the 1980s, including Simple Minds. "But the music business wasn't very nice," he says, "so I gave up trying to hit the big time and for a while I just jogged along with the band." Gerard then went to train as an art teacher and it was back in the classroom that he rekindled his love affair with painting. "I remember being overwhelmed by the thrill, the magic and the power of holding a brush again and by the sense of achievement when your paint sweeps over the canvas and your strokes come out as recognisable images."

After ten years of teaching, Gerard made the brave decision to take up painting full-time. "By then I had a young family and the pressure was on me to make it work," he says. "I did some commercial watercolours of Glasgow, but they didn't sell, so I had to scrabble around for a while. We weren't exactly starving but it did take me a while to find my feet. Then, I decided to stop trying to please others and paint what appealed to me. It was another terrible risk, and it felt like I was dropping my security blanket. There I was painting a 7ft-wide picture of a bull being led by a little girl.

Some may have wondered if I'd taken leave of my senses." Gerard, bluff and charismatic, roars with laughter. He enjoys poking fun at himself, even though he has had to struggle through critical indifference to his work.

When he took another plunge and held a show of his paintings at the end of last year, he couldn't resist having a dig at the art establishment. Invitations went out with a piece of Blu-Tack in a plastic bag. On it, he wrote, 'Do-it-yourself modern art kit. Turner Prize guaranteed. Let the acclaim and celebrity begin.Alternatively, if you want to see real art with integrity, sincerity and ability, you are invited to my show.' Now he says, "I was just having a laugh. There is a gulf between the way I work and the broad spectrum of contemporary art. You have to draw a line and say either, 'I don't understand it', or dare to say, 'I'm not impressed'. I look at some of this so-called contemporary art and I wonder if the artist is taking the mickey. A lot of it alienates people. I want to make paintings people can relate to and appreciate."

The bull he says, represents raw masculine power and the girl femininity. Yet she, the weaker, vulnerable one, is gently and firmly leading him away. The bull, rampant, untamed, uncivilised, is meekly allowing himself to be controlled by a mere slip of a girl, with the trees in the background symbolising the wilderness from which she is taking him. "It took me five months to complete it. At one stage I had virtually finished the painting when I decided it wasn't working. So I took a four-inch brush, covered it with a fresh coat of paint and started again." It was while working on The Labyrinth that Gerard took a telephone call from actor Ewan McGregor. He had seen some of Gerard's paintings on show at a Glasgow hotel, where they had already caught the eye of film director Ridley Scott's son, Jake. Ewan wanted to buy one of the paintings but they'd all been sold.

"He asked me if I had anything else, so I told him that I was working on this painting of a girl leading a white bull. I wouldn't have blamed him if he'd said, "Thanks, but no thanks," and slammed the phone down. Instead, he said he'd like first refusal on it when it was finished.

"I've been trying to get in touch with him to see if he is still interested, and I've sent him a photograph of it. Unfortunately he's in America making a film at the moment and it's impossible for us to get together until later in the summer." Gerard adds with a laugh, "Maybe the fact that I've won the NOT The Turner Prize will make him realise he has the chance of hanging a future masterpiece on his wall."