Richard Burton's themes are banal: everyday furniture, upholstered surfaces, spaces that look like waiting rooms or vehicle interiors. All of this is fabricated in an act of ‘world building’.
He takes satisfaction from starting out with nothing and ending up with something, even if that something is a very thin kind of reality, with boredom hanging in the air. Despite that listless quality, he's always trying to reach for an excitement along the edges, where objects glow – a sci-fi-infused sense of being transported somewhere.
The sand he uses creates a texture that from a distance is like a wall. He's drawn to the challenge of depicting something beautiful and compelling, while also imbuing it with
a sense of claustrophobia or dread. For Burton, painting is a world of shadows, where one thing hides behind another in the fiction of pictorial space. This interplay between surface and illusion is a huge part of the pleasure he finds in image-making.