Charles Burwell

Charles Burwell received his BFA from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art (Philadelphia, PA) in 1977, and his MFA from Yale University School of Art (New Haven, CT) in 1979. He has participated in many exhibitions, including solo shows at Bridgette Mayer Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (Wilmington, DE), Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH), the University of Delaware (Newark, DE), and Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA). He has taught at Tyler School of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI), and Dartmouth College and has been a Visiting Artist at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA), Brandeis University (Waltham, MA), and Yale University, among others. Burwell’s work is included in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA), the Delaware Art Museum (Wilmington, DE), Hood Museum, (Hanover, MA), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia, PA), The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY) and other collections. He has been the recipient of two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships, a United States Information Agency grant for Middle East travel, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

Burwell is considered one of the top contemporary African American painters of the 21st Century. His work is in some of the top public and private collections within the United States.

Artist Statement:

Some of my earliest artist influences were Cy Twombly, Mark Tobey, Agnes Martin and Jack Tworkov. Since the mid 1970’s, around the time I saw a Cy Twombly exhibition at the ICA in Philadelphia, the use of the linear mark has been a constant element in my work. That linear, graphic sensibility that I saw in these artists had a great influence on the development of my art, and it has continued to evolve in my work over the years. The exploration of complex linear elements continues to be a dominant part of how I develop paintings and drawings. Another aspect of my work that had its spark in the 1970’s when I was in art school is an interest in process. Through visits to the Museum of Modern Art and seeing the range of American abstract art (particularly Pollock), I became interested in the formal ways in which paintings are constructed.

The work I’ve been doing since the early 1990’s involves a specific layering process. They mostly rely on the interaction of the controlled dripped line, maze like linear forms, and organic and geometric forms. The paintings are constructed one layer of forms at a time, starting with layers of drips that have a specific color structure. The forms I use are part of a constantly evolving vocabulary of shapes that began with organic forms I started developing in the early to mid-1980’s. At that time, I was interested in pre-history, and used forms derived from biology, archeology and natural history. When developing images, I still sometimes refer to the biological diagrams and photos I’ve collected over the years. Now however, they have become simplified, are less illustrative and are more general or ambiguous. The forms have their own developmental process involving genealogy and hybridization. A shape may have a familiar quality, but it remains uncertain whether its origins are organic, or derived from an industrial product. The development and evolution of the paintings are integrally connected to the evolving nature of the forms. I’ve developed hundreds of templates of varying sizes, for solid shapes as well as for liner forms. Symmetry, asymmetry, anthropomorphic, geometric, biomorphic are some of the categories of forms I use.

Take a look at Burwell’s CV.