Janelle Lynch honors Charles Burchfield with new photographs by Colin Dabkowski in The Buffalo News
On a series of trips to Buffalo spread over a year, photographer Janelle Lynch learned all she could about watercolorist Charles E. Burchfield. She also took her camera into Burchfield’s woods in West Seneca, setting out to create work that would mirror some of the great painter’s visual and intellectual concerns. The result, a series of 17 photographs called “Presence,” goes on view Friday in the Burchfield Penney Art Center (1300 Elmwood Ave.).
“The exhibition celebrates my kinship with Charles Burchfield, which is based on a reverence for an anthropomorphic vision of the natural world, an appreciation for solitude as well as close relationships, and a commitment to creative freedom,” Lynch said in a statement. The work is the culmination of the Burchfield Penney’s first official Charles E. Burchfield artist in residence, a program intended to highlight or create new connections between Burchfield’s work and concerns and the contemporary art world.
In a statement, Burchfield Penney director Anthony Bannon said the residency was designed to “extend Charles Burchfield’s legacy to an utterly new and revealing appreciation of all that it might mean, through words and images, to be alive and in the midst of a still embracing nature.”
This weekend also marks the monthly free Second Fridays event, which will feature the opening of the center’s new “Burchfield Botanicals” exhibition and the debut of new videos for its perpetual outdoor installation known as “The Front Yard.” Admission Friday is free, but otherwise is $5 to $10. Call 878-6011 or visit burchfieldpenney.org.