Word: burchfield
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...fledgling U.S. collector had put together in a few years. The viewers saw a handsome survey of 57 paintings and six sculptures covering 180 years of U.S. art, from a serene John Singleton Copley portrait, Mrs. Roger Morris, finished in 1772, to first modern works by Watercolorists Charles Burchfield and John Marin, Painters Charles Sheeler, Edward Hopper and Morris Graves...
Hobgoblin Mood. Burchfield's love for nature grew naturally out of his boyhood in Salem, Ohio. The woods, fields and swamps on Salem's outskirts were his favorite refuge, where he found a private world overlaid with hobgoblin moods, hints of dark, mysterious forces and occasional lyrical sunbursts of delight. But his first struggling attempts to set down this world of nature met with little popular success. Ever self-doubting, Burchfield decided to turn to realistic paintings of the world...
...Burchfield discovered the scenes that first made him famous in the back streets and industrial areas of Buffalo, where he took a job as a wallpaper designer, worked on art in his spare hours. By the time he decided to devote himself full time to his art, his realistic scenes of grim train yards, black iron drawbridges, rows of workers' unpainted houses had put him in the forefront of the American Scene painters of the 1930s. But as one critic quipped, Burchfield, with his prevailing gloomy mood (see cut above), seemed too often like Painter Edward Hopper...
...until 1943 that Burchfield began to find his way home again. One day, while mounting work from his Ohio days, Burchfield suddenly decided to use his early sketches as a starting point, expand them in his old lyric style. The attempt, he wrote, released "a long-pent-up subconscious yearning to do fanciful things, and once started, it seemed to sweep onward like a flooded stream; there was no stopping it." An example of Burchfield's new-found freedom is Summer Afternoon (opposite), started as a sketch in 1917 and completed as a watercolor in 1948. The finished scene...
Final Harvest. Recently, Burchfield has thrown off his former dependency on his early sketches, found his inspiration directly in nature. One of his best is Oncoming Spring (opposite), a triumphal rendering of a theme that had been germinating in his mind since 1915. In a rapturous letter Burchfield described the final harvest: "Hardly had I set up my easel when a thunderstorm came up. I decided nothing was going to stop my painting, and hurriedly got my huge beach umbrella and my raincoat. I protected my legs with a portfolio, the wind holding it in place. And so I painted...