David Burch

I was born in small town Alberta but lived most of my adult life in Toronto and New York City. I was initially an art collector in both cities but that changed abruptly in my mid fifties when I started talking classes in painting at the Art Students League (ASL) of New York City while engaging in epidemiological research into the health consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident as a professor at Columbia University, NYC. (Columbia recruited me in 1995 after 25 years of cancer epidemiology at the University of Toronto). My interest in art exploded with exposure to great art in New York City and extensive travel throughout the former Soviet Union necessitated by Chernobyl. I was particularly inspired by the work of Robert Rafailovich Falk whose work in oils was shown at the New Tretyakov Museum in Moscow.

From the very beginning of my art classes at the ASL in NYC I was fortunate to have by choice Ronnie Landfield as my primary instructor. Ronnie is regarded as one of the pre-eminent abstract impressionists of his generation and his esteemed exploration of colour became the driving force of my own work in colour in both oils and acrylics on canvas. ,The world of colour in its manifestation, real or imagined, painted abstractly allows both myself and the viewers of my work to fully embrace the wonderment of colour and to fully explore the basics of colour, relationships between colours and the intrinsic nuances of colour. Artistically I demand the viewer to react intellectually and or emotionally to my expression of colour.