Nothing comes from nowhere: an interview with Anthony Burrill.
‘Nothing comes from nowhere.’
I have heard my grandfather say these words all my life. He strongly influenced me, and this message, though simple, means you can only achieve completeness through action. We need to fill the emptiness, the gaps, the void of life by making something.
This same statement is in the work of British graphic artist, printmaker and designer Anthony Burrill and motivated me to try and get an interview with him.
I started asking where the statement came from:
Anthony: I was listening to an interview with Richard Rogers (the British architect), and it was within one of his sentences: “nothing comes from nowhere”. I liked the phrase; the words ‘nothing’ and ‘nowhere’ and the nothingness, the emptiness they both have, just as an idea. Then, thinking is like everything we experience in our lives, how we experience children growing up, and all that has a relevant impact on our lives, our value system, and the way we live. It is about ideas brought from other ideas. Nothing comes from a vacuum; it doesn’t just appear.
“All my work is about simplifying those big ideas into very simple short statements, and being able to reduce things as much as possible (…) Just have enough visual information to…
