Clip & save art notes

ABOUT THE ARTIST

When Charles Ephraim Burchfield (1893-1967) was a boy, he often took long walks around his home in Salem, Ohio, to observe the natural world. He marveled at the progression of the seasons, the quality and changes in light over the course of the day, and especially the weather. He once said, "I've been interested in weather since I was a little kid. When I was in the third grade, at the end of each day I'd write down on my mother's big kitchen calendar what kind of weather we had that day." (Quote excerpted from www. butlerart.com.)

After high school, Burchfield completed four years of study at the Cleveland School of Art, followed by a few months of art training in New York City. He served for a short period of time in the United States Army where he worked as a camouflage painter, after which he relocated to Buffalo, N.Y., taking a job as a wallpaper designer.

During this early period he painted in his spare time, married and started a family. In 1929, his professional life took a change for the better when a noted New York City art dealer decided to represent him. Burchfield quit his job and devoted himself to painting on a full-time basis. He never looked back.

Unlike Edward Hopper, his friend and contemporary, Burchfield's body of work is highly expressionistic and symbolic. In the early phase of his career (1915-1921), he produced hundreds of watercolor paintings that depict natural scenes in fantastical and mystical ways. In 1917 alone, a year that he referred to as his "golden year," he painted over 400 watercolors of nature.

In this same year, the artist sketched a catalog of symbolic shapes to represent the darker side of the human psyche: emotions and states of mind such as loneliness, evil, fear and brooding. Indeed, many of Burchfield's paintings contain an undertone of melancholy and anxiety, not unlike the Norwegian Expressionist Edvard Munch (see Sept. 2007 Arts & Activities).

"Burchfield painted from real and imagined memories of his childhood, as well as from dreams. He was fascinated by spirits and mysterious places filled with a sense of foreboding. Burchfield's fears and anxieties are palpably visible." (Quote excerpted from www.tfaoi.com.) This sense of foreboding is apparent in this month's Clip & Save Art Print, Night of the Equinox, a picture the artist began in 1917 and then reworked in 1955.

Symbolism was not only an interest of Burchfield's, but an elemental component of his artistic philosophy and working process. He once said, "An artist must paint not what he sees in nature, but what is there. To do so he must invent symbols, which, if properly used, make his work seem even more real than what is in front of him." Symbols that represent wind, sound and rain are commonly found in Burchfield's watercolors, especially those that depict weather conditions or other natural phenomena.

Burchfield historians have described his career as having three phases: the first in which he painted landscapes and nature depictions; the second in which he became characterized as a Midwestern Regionalist, due to his shift in subject matter from nature to images of industrialization in the small towns of America (although he never treated the Midwest in the mythic manner of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton or John Steuart Curry); and, finally, a return to the mystical landscapes of his youth, in which he created new pieces and also enlarged and reworked ones created between 1917 and 1921.

In the early phase of his career, Burchfield abandoned the method of first sketching an image onto the paper before applying the watercolors. In 1917 he began using the dry-brush method, in which the minimum amount of water is placed on the brush, giving the colors a greater intensity and depth.

In addition to weather scenes, images of the cosmos and visual meditations on the mystery of nature, he was fascinated by architecture (Victorian houses, barns and factories), street scenes and boatyards. During the 1930s and '40s, he was one of America's most popular and commercially successful artists, despite the wave of modernism that was swelling in the art world.

In describing the life and work of Charles Burchfield, perhaps his friend, the great American painter Edward Hopper, said it best: "The work of Charles Burchfield is most decidedly founded, not on art, but on life, and the life that he knows and loves best."

ABOUT THE PAINTING

This month's Clip & Save Art Print, Charles Burchfield's Night of the Equinox (1917-1955), is based on a childhood memory of the artist's: "One of the most exciting weather events of the whole year was what we called the spring equinoctial storm ... It seemed as if terrific forces were abroad in the land. It was delightful, lying there in bed with a sense of cozy security, to imagine that outside fearful monsters were at war with each other."

Burchfield began Night of the Equinox in 1917, and later revisited the composition in a method that became a common practice in the latter part of his career. Burchfield very carefully enlarged the original painting by adding paper to its edges. From there he would rework the composition into a more fully realized work.