About

About

Jim Bourke is a Toronto-based figurative painter deeply influenced by the waxed base medium of encaustic. His bold paintings capture the subtlest gestures and nuances of the hand, each piece evolving through a process of decisions and revisions, leaving visible traces of its construction He studied fine art at York University, graduated from OCAD, and later pursued computer animation at Sheridan College. A former board member of the Propeller Gallery, he is currently an active member of the Red Head Gallery artists' collective. Bourke has received numerous awards in juried exhibitions, including those by the Ontario Society of Artists (OSA), the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition (TOAE), the Mississauga Art Gallery, and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA). He was featured on the reality TV show Star Portraits and was a finalist in the Kingston Prize for Portraiture. His paintings are held in various private and corporate collections.

Artist Statement

Bourke paints with an eye to what lingers. Each surface is a trace—of time, of touch, of thought taking form. A painting, for him, is less an image than a memory unfolding: part gesture, part residue, part revision. Encaustic, with its molten clarity and physical depth, carries these layers forward—holding the mark, revealing its history.

His works linger in moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed: the flash of a match, the shake of a dog, sand slipping through fingers, juice pressed from fruit, a glance that doesn’t quite land. These fragments of time suggest a story, but one that resists resolution. Like frames from a film never made, they invite meaning while refusing to settle.

In some, a hand lights a match—at once a gesture of ignition, a nod to the medium’s heat, and a playful wink at the myth of artistic inspiration. In others, the suited male figure—once a symbol of power—appears as a ghost or relic, refracted through nostalgia and the media dreams of the 1960s. Bourke is less interested in the story itself than in how it flickers, breaks, and repeats.

He works not only within the frame but against it. A painting may contain an echo of another—smaller, embedded, part-lost in wax—as if one image is melting into the next. The edge of the canvas is never the end; it’s a hinge, a threshold, a pause before continuation. One painting looks sideways to the next, like stills in a slow, silent sequence.

Design. Surface. Memory. Gesture. Sequence. Bourke returns to these again and again—not as answers, but as questions. What can a painting hold? What does it let go? Each work is a proposition: quiet, material, and alive with what remains.