Ed fairburn

Using a wide variety of canvases including railroad blueprints, star charts, geological and street maps, Welsh artist Ed Fairburn (previously here and here) uses additive and subtractive techniques to create portraits that seem pefectly integrated with the topography of streets, mountains and rivers. It’s been almost a year since we last checked in with Fairburn whose process and approach to creating these stunning portraits continues to evolve. One of his most striking methods is to…

English artist Ed Fairburn (previously) uses vintage road maps and star charts as canvases for drawn portraits. Cross-hatched patterns and shaded regions inside roads, borders, and rivers assimilate into the contours of faces as if the images had always been secretly hidden in the map’s topography. “In his hands, both built infrastructure and natural phenomena echo the organic human form,” shares Mike Wright Gallery. “National highway systems become capillaries, and the tangle of Paris’…

4 Original Artworks curated by Eric Spence, Drawings. Original Art Collection created on 3/21/2014.

Ed Fairburn has an uncanny ability to make visual connections with various map elements and human facial features.

For my project I need to find relevant street maps and recreate them in a interesting, artistic way. It should depict how visitors see and experience the areas. Conventional maps can be very grey a…

above: Windermere, Pencil on a cropped map of the English Lakes – specifically Lake Windermere. Cardiff-based illustrator Ed Fairburn sees things in maps most of us do not. His map-based portraits combine the art of cartography with the drawing of the human face. Making the curves and lines of the two dimensional terrain (or the heavens as is the case with his celestial drawings) blend with the curves and lines of human features brings a dimensionality to both the maps and the portraits. The…