Gilda Pervin (b. 1933)

Gilda Pervin,an artist and teacher, received an artist's fellowship grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1993 to research and create a new body of work relating to Charles Burchfield. Pervin is best known as a sculptor who presents vignettes that she calls “slices of domestic interiors.”  Her work can be described as freestanding floor and wall segments that incorporate household objects, such as lamps, vases, clocks, shelves, and frames.

For her NYFA project, Pervin investigated Burchfield’s journals of the 1920s, when he was employed at the M. H. Birge & Sons Company in Buffalo to design wallpaper. “What was most interesting to me about the circumstances of Burchfield’s life," Pervin said, “was that it was so ‘regular’.” It was a time during which he got married to Bertha Kenreich, his hometown sweetheart from Salem, Ohio, and they began raising their family of five children.

Pervin’s interpretation of the personal struggles that Burchfield underwent, juggling his commercial work to support his young family and his aspirations to devote all his energy on his watercolor painting, is illustrated in Day Job Into Night. A reproduction of Burchfield’s wallpaper, Sunflowers, which was among his first designs in 1921, comes to life three-dimensionally with Pervin’s use of pigmented cement. It contributes to making the scene look like a dream or fantasy world. It is easy to imagine the artist’s life by glancing at the children’s toys scattered on the floor and rugs; the old-fashioned, push-button electric wall switches; and the dark wooden table strewn with pinecones, a fedora and tie, and a lighted lamp resting on an antimacassar.

--Nancy Weekly