David Burch’s artistic journey is layered with the unexpected. Born in Alberta, Canada, he did not begin his adult life with a paintbrush in hand. In 1967, at the age of 23, he completed a second degree with First Class Honours in Sociology at the University of Calgary. Shortly after, he moved east to Toronto, where he spent nearly three decades. Those years opened doors not only to a career and a new city, but also to art itself. What began as collecting grew into a calling, and Burch shifted from sociology toward the canvas. His eventual embrace of abstract expressionism felt less like a sharp turn than a gradual uncovering of something always present. The colors, the shapes, the bold energy of his work point back to a lifetime of observation—an intellectual curiosity now translated into visual form. His paintings, vibrant and expressive, reflect both discipline and release.
Big Sky Country
Big Sky Country, oil on canvas, 30” x 40” x 2”, is a work that captures Burch’s connection to landscape without rendering it literally. The piece is at once abstract and deeply rooted in place. A sweep of yellow fills the lower half of the canvas, a field or a plain suggested more than defined. Above it, a vast expanse of blue surges outward, textured with swirls of violet, lavender, and muted greens. The title tells us we are looking not just at any land, but at the prairie, the open stretches of Canada that shaped Burch’s early life.
The canvas is large enough to pull the viewer in, yet the simplicity of its composition leaves space for interpretation. The yellow is not a single flat tone. Instead, it shifts—brighter in some places, deepening toward ochre and even brushing up against orange in others. Flecks of green and pale lilac enter the field, almost like whispers of plant life or light breaking across uneven ground. Nothing is fixed; everything feels in motion, caught in a play of color and brushstroke.
The sky, by contrast, feels heavier. It dominates, as it does in prairie country, where the horizon stretches without obstruction and the atmosphere becomes the real subject. Burch has filled it with layered blues, not the calm blue of a summer day but the restless blue of weather—clouds forming, dissolving, churning. The brushwork here is loose, swirling, almost cosmic. It suggests both distance and energy, a reminder of how small land can feel under such a sky.
There is a quiet tension between the two halves of the painting. The ground seems solid but shifting; the sky is expansive, unsettled. Together, they create a dialogue—stability against change, certainty against openness. The simplicity of the composition is deceptive. The work is not about a single field or a single day, but about the feeling of being in a place where land and atmosphere meet in vast proportions.
What makes Big Sky Country compelling is its ability to evoke memory without narrative. For someone from the prairies, the painting may recall harvest fields, the sweep of canola, or the bright gold of wheat. For others, it may suggest a broader idea of openness—of being in a place where the horizon frees the mind. Burch does not tie us down to a literal reading. Instead, he provides an impression, heightened by bold color, and leaves the rest to the viewer’s own associations.
The choice of oil on canvas gives the piece both richness and weight. The texture of oil allows for depth in the sky, where each swirl holds traces of underpainting. The field, too, benefits from oil’s capacity to layer: strokes overlap, blending yet retaining individuality. The medium carries the intensity of the palette without flattening it, letting the light within the colors shift depending on perspective and illumination.
As an abstract expressionist, Burch works less to depict than to reveal. In Big Sky Country, he reveals the immensity of landscape as an emotional truth. The prairie becomes less about its physical details and more about its vastness, its openness, its ability to humble and uplift. His sociology background may even echo here, not in data or theory, but in the way he frames human experience—small beneath the sky, yet tied to the land.
Viewed in silence, the painting speaks through color and form alone. It does not tell a story, yet it carries the weight of one. For Burch, it is both memory and expression, a canvas where the act of painting merges with the essence of place. For the viewer, it is an invitation to step into that space and feel the enormity of sky and field pressing against each other, eternal and immediate.
