Born in small town Alberta, Canada, David Burch first lived as an art collector in Toronto and New York City, and was influenced by the art museums of those great cities. He was then given the great opportunity to travel throughout the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, where...as an emerging artist... he found great inspiration with Robert Rafailovich Falk's paintings in oil shown at the New Tretyakov Museum in Moscow.
David's work has also been influenced by Ronnie Landfield who is regarded as one of the pre-eminent abstract impressionists of his generation. David, while living in New York City for eleven years, had the opportunity to attend classes in painting at the Art Students League of NYC and had Mr. Landfield as his primary instructor.
Although David now lives in Edmonton, Alberta, he travels frequently back to NYC and concurrently still paints at the Art Students League with Ronnie Landfield. David began to paint with a heavy emphasis on idealized abstract landscapes but recently has dramatically changed with a re-evaluation of brushwork and how it accentuates color and design to create visually appealing forms. The evocative titles of each of his paintings urge viewers to see and experience the world around them in different ways.
On a more personal intimate level, David Burch is bi-polar. He chooses to paint with a lot of color and he admits that doing so helps him cope with this chronic depression. He is of that generation of gay men who "came out" in the late 1960s but he was fortunate to be accepted by his family and was openly gay from 1967 onwards, choosing employment as a cancer epidemiologist first at the University of Toronto and later, Columbia University in New York City. He was a professed alcoholic and would like to recognize the importance of Alcoholics Anonymous keeping him sober since quitting drinking in January of 1991. David shares "If I had not quit drinking when I did, I would have lost my position as Assistant Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Toronto and therefore would never have moved to NYC and probably would not have started to paint".
To this day David paints almost every day and almost rarely has a day where he leaves the paintbrush to rest. The only time one finds him in this state is when he has run out of canvases.
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It has often been said that artists, especially painters of canvases in oil and acrylics, see the physical world and the non-physical world of ideas and emotions from a different perspective from that of others. Throughout all my artistic expression I see the world around me in colour often in vivid colour and my interpretation of the relationships and dynamics of the interplay between colours is a major focus.
David Burch.
ABOUT
DAVID BURCH
