"...a body of works that is a tour de force, existing
simultaneously as music, poetry, philosophy and painting."
— Nancy Weekly, Head of Collections and the Charles
Cary Rumsey Curator, Burchfield Penney Art Center
Catherine Esther Burchfield Parker was born in 1926, the
fourth daughter and second-to-last child of renowned American watercolorist
Charles E. Burchfield and his wife, Bertha (Kenreich), a farmer’s daughter.
Parker was raised in Gardenville, NY.
In 1929, the same year that her younger brother was born,
Parker’s mother encouraged her father to leave his day job and devote himself
full time to painting. Parker is grateful to have been taught
that “artist” was a permissible career choice. But for the Burchfield family,
with five children born in a seven-year span, life in a rural suburb of
Buffalo, NY on an artist’s income, became—and remained—a constant financial
challenge.
Despite these challenges, the Burchfields instilled in their
children a love of art and music. When her family would go to a restaurant for
a rare dinner out, a live string trio filled young Catherine with dreams of
someday performing in a similar setting. She did take up the cello as a child.
The Burchfield children were also imbued with an
appreciation of the power of nature—though Parker’s impressions of nature,
portrayed frequently in her watercolor, gouache and charcoals on paper, are often kinder and gentler than those which come through in her father’s
work. Both painters do show spiritual and symbolic elements in their art.
Post-high school, Parker studied for a year at the Buffalo
Art Institute. An enduring issue arose; her desire to acknowledge her father,
yet distance herself from both her own and others’ comparisons of her work to
his.
Her first solution was to leave. In 1947, Parker moved to
Missouri, studying at the Kansas City Art Institute for three years. During
that time, her principal painting instructor was Ross E. Braught (1898-1983); the
influence of his stylized landscapes and rhythmic compositions can still be
felt in her work.
In 1950, she married fellow student Kenneth Parker, and,
between 1951 and 1957, they had three children—Christine, Douglas and Jennifer.
In 1956, after a few years in Denver, Colorado, they moved their family to
Amarillo, Texas. Parker was painting and exhibiting her work, but not feeling very
connected to it. Around 1967, she stopped—and didn’t paint for eight solid
years. She returned to her childhood study of the cello. As she continued to
search for her own artistic identity, her father died in 1967.
In 1970, she earned a Bachelors degree in Music Education
from West Texas State University. In her own words, she had become a “good
amateur” musician. She performed with the Amarillo Symphony (then still an
amateur organization), and in chamber music groups.
Her marriage to Parker ended in 1975,
and she moved again. “It might seem cliché, but, as a divorced single mother, I
moved to Santa Cruz, California,” says a much more mature Parker. The move and
the new landscape inspired a renewed interest and confidence in her painting.
She took up her brush, wielding it both in her own work and as a teacher.
By 1983, with a longing to return “home,” Parker retraced
her steps to Buffalo. At the time, she simply felt a sense of wanting to define
herself as a “northeasterner,” despite having spent almost 40 years away from
it. She began painting with vigor, and embarked upon establishing a close
community of personal, artistic and spiritual connections, which she enjoys
today.
She participated in dozens of solo and group shows in and
around the Northeast during this period. In 1988, one of her career-defining
moments occurred when she was given a solo show of her new works at the Butler
Institute of American Art, in Youngstown, Ohio. In 1994, acknowledging her
artistic growth, she was awarded a painting fellowship to the MacDowell Colony.
In 1999, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the Buffalo
institute named after her father, and whose mission is to promote his and other
regional artists’ work, also presented her work in a solo show.
All of her works convey both her love of travel, and the
ethereal, potentially contradictory notion that wherever you are, is somehow
still “home.” From scenes of Buffalo’s glorious yet crumbling industrial
structures to a sunflower in her kitchen, to a Costa Rican jungle, her work is
true to this vision. While Parker does not have to see a place to paint it, she
revels in being elsewhere.
Her favorite American city is San Francisco, followed by
New York, Chicago and New Orleans. Travels to London, Paris and Papua New
Guinea have entranced her. She visits her children and grandchildren frequently
in California, New Mexico and Minnesota.
Her artistic inspirations range from the Impressionist
master, Henri Matisse, to contemporary artists Richard Diebenkorn and David
Hockney.
Looking back after almost 25 years of purposeful living in
Western New York, Parker has refined the area’s appeal for her. “There is a
sense of tradition here. I am impressed with people who have roots, who have
perhaps taken over family businesses,” she says. “Here in the northeast, the
hills even seem older. I like the land itself, the change of seasons.”
A sense of external place, as well as an internal seeking
has always driven Parker, informing her art in various ways. She has painted
many works influenced by the jazz music she loves, as well as painting to
classical music and poetry.
Commissions and collaborations with other artists, musicians and poets, have motivated her to paint several series. She has found inspiration for these series in both contemporary and classical music by Bach, Copland, Messiaen, and Sibelius, and poetry by Pablo Neruda and George Herbert.
Parker recently acknowledged that she does not define
herself as a “nature lover,” though she is deeply affected by whatever type of
“scape”—city, desert, forest, beach,
industrial—she is in.
“What is ‘nature’?” she asks. “It is cityscapes,
buildings—it’s more accurate to say that I am influenced by my natural
surroundings, whatever they may be.”
“I love the implied ‘character’ of cities, the structures,
bridges, windows, the ‘mystery,’” says the artist. “The way the light—whether
natural or artificial, daytime or night—hits certain parts and the shadows they
cast; the ‘guts’ of the city: rivers, industrial parts, the train stations; the
moods, personalities, and even gender.”
In Parker’s ongoing quest for truth in her work, she sees
herself having come full circle. “There’s a T.S. Eliot poem that echoes my
feelings,” she says. “The poem goes ‘We shall not cease from exploration, And
the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the
place for the first time.’ My interpretation, through my own
journey—geographically and spiritually—is that, when you first start out, a
tree is a tree, and a flower is a flower. Then you seek these different,
symbolic meanings and experiences. Eventually you come back to the place where
a tree is tree, and a rock is a rock—but there
is a completely different feel.”
Parker’s explorations have indeed brought her back to where
she started, and also to seeing herself and her work, as Eliot says, “for the
first time.”
by Jana Eisenberg, 2010