Presentation – Burchfield Scholar Nancy Weekly on American Watercolorist Charles Burchfield

American watercolorist Charles Burchfield had a special relationship with Zoar Valley, and we are pleased to welcome Nancy Weekly, Burchfield Scholar at the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State University, who will present remarks about Charles Burchfield’s relationship with nature and his artistic output depicting Zoar Valley and its environs. Ms. Weekly is also the author of “Charles E. Burchfield: The Sacred Woods.” This is a free event being held in the Mongerson Theater at the Springville Center for the Arts.

Burchfield discovered Zoar Valley in the 1920’s shortly after moving to Buffalo. He named the forests in and around the Gowanda canyons “the Big Woods.” A pantheist at heart, Burchfield regarded forests as sacred spaces, and Zoar certainly held this draw for him. Burchfield returned to the forests of Zoar over more than 40 years to paint expressions of his relationship with nature in what he described as his “forest interior” works:  “Flame of Spring” (1948), “Light Coming into a Woods” (1954), “Arctic Owl and Winter Moon” (1960), “Eye of God in a Woods” (1949; reworked in1962 as “Presence of God in a Woods”), “Clatter of Crows in Spring Woods” (1949), “Fires of Spring in Big Woods” (1951), and “Hemlock in November” (1947-1966) (the last painting Burchfield worked on), among Burchfield’s many other works in and around Zoar. Burchfield also expressed Zoar’s beauty in viewscapes: “March Sunlight” (1926-1934), “The Cliff” (1928), “March Day at Gowanda” (1926-1933), and “Lavender and Old Lace” (1939-1947), among others.

SPEAKER NANCY WEEKLY: Nancy Weekly is the leading authority on the American artist Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967), serving for more than 43 years as the Burchfield Scholar at the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State University. Recent exhibitions and publications compare his work with Seneca artist G. Peter Jemison, solar photographer Alan Friedman, poet Walt Whitman, and contemporary artist Mike Glier. In May 2024, she presented “Charles Burchfield’s Synesthetic Art Legacy” at the international Synesthesia Conference at Somerville College, University of Oxford in Oxford, England. She has also curated exhibitions about artists affiliated with Western New York, including John E. Brent, Buffalo’s first African American architect. She retired from teaching at the State University of New York and has been both a reviewer and panelist for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

NOT TO BE MISSED!  Three of Burchfield’s paintings in Zoar Valley are currently on display as part of the “Poetic Passages: Burchfield from the Munson Museum of Art” exhibit at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY, through July 27, 2025: “Flame of Spring” (1948), an inspired forest interior painted in the Big Woods, “Lace Gables” (1935), an ornate Gothic farmhouse that enchanted Burchfield so much he returned to paint it several times, and “Village in the Swamps” (1930), a late evening view looking down over the Village of Gowanda as Burchfield emerged on a ridge from a day of painting in the Big Woods, described by Burchfield as his favorite painting completed that year. “Poetic Passages” is a rare opportunity to see the entire Burchfield collection of the Munson Museum of Art, along with select Burchfield Penney collection sketches. The exhibit is a celebration of Burchfield’s lifetime of art across each of his style periods, including one of his masterpieces, “The Sphinx and the Milky Way” (1946).