The Daily Bulletin Archive

The Burchfield Penney Art Center will present Burchfield’s Birds: All That Jizz, a class and workshop on Sunday, March 9, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., as part of its International Center for Watercolor series.

Jizz is a term used by birders who have learned to identify different species of birds based on a bird’s characteristic impression. In our workshop, we will explore the timeless depiction of birds highlighted in Charles Burchfield’s works. We will take our inspiration from the energy of the birds themselves and translate it into works of visual and literary art.

Charles Burchfield said he liked to be able to "advance and retreat just like a man writing a book." Painter Kateri Ewing will lead us as we advance toward watercoloring a bird of our choosing, and writer Karen Lee Lewis will develop a writing retreat that helps transition from painting to creative writing. All levels are welcome.

Kateri Ewing is a writer and self-taught watercolorist from East Aurora, New York. The fields, ponds, and woodlands of her beloved Knox Farm State Park are her place of inspiration. She hopes to reveal the intricate details of the cycles of nature, the luminous particulars she notices in natural objects, such as a single seedhead of grass, a broken acorn, a decaying leaf, or the spirit of a tiny nuthatch spiraling down a hemlock tree. The birds of Western New York have become her favorite subject to capture on paper, as she aspires to portray each one in a way that reveals its uniqueness, right down to the spark of life in its eye. It is the desire to urge others to pause and look a bit more closely that stokes her creative fire in both writing and visual art.

Karen Lee Lewis is an avid birder and poet and a council member of the Buffalo Ornithological Society. She teaches creative writing extensively throughout Western New York and offers writing workshops for adults at Buffalo’s C. G. Jung Center. Lewis is also a teacher consultant for the Western New York Writing Project. Her new chapbook is a 10-part poem paired with original photographs, and was inspired by Charles Burchfield’s painting Solitude.

To register for this workshop, please contact Kathy Gaye Shiroki, ext. 3549, or download the registration form. Cost: $30 for members and $40 for not-yet members.