Touring Burchfield
Aug 25, 2010

I don’t get to give tours of the exhibitions so much these days as I did when I was a Teaching Fellow, but last week, I had the chance to give a tour of Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield to a group of amateur musicians from Queens. All that the group knew of Burchfield’s work was that they were landscapes painted with watercolor. I gathered that this had conjured in their minds a rather conventional and delicate image.

It was a joy to see the group’s understanding and appreciation of the work on view expand and deepen with the tour, as mine had as I worked with the exhibition: from his early explorations of modernism through his realist mid-career successes to his later embrace of expressive forms.

Burchfield’s large-scale, dynamic paintings are far from conventional or delicate. Exuberant, transcendent—even psychedelic—come closer to conveying the sensibility his late work. And as far as watercolor, Burchfield mastered the medium like no artist I’ve seen, re-working his pieces vigorously right down to the paper itself.

Sharing the work with audiences on a tour creates a special relationship where I see the work fresh through their eyes each time, which in turn contributes to my own connection to the work. No matter where my relationship to work in an exhibition begins, I end up in a very different place after touring the show.

By Ellen Tepfer, Coordinator of the Docent Program and Teaching Fellows