Janelle Lynch (b. 1969)

From January through December 2013, Janelle Lynch was the first Artist-In-Residence at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in a new program for researchers developing a discourse inspired by the work of Charles E. Burchfield. The Artist-In-Residence program was funded by an endowment established in memory of founding director Edna M. Lindemann, Ed.D. with support from Peter C. and Joan Andrews. Recipients will use the Burchfield Penney’s collections and archives to further their own work and expand our understanding of Charles Burchfield as a person, artist, and poetic writer.

Photographer Janelle Lynch, a native of Jamestown, New York, was the first participant to be selected. For the past decade she had increasingly recognized a kinship in her work to that of Burchfield which started as the result of a series of her nature-related photographs. Using a large format, 8×10-inch camera and a portrait lens, she photographed sites in Western New York, as well as her wooded home in the Catskill Mountains, seeking metaphors for the imagined presence of friends and family elders through an empathetic understanding of nature that parallels Burchfield’s.