Word: burchfields
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Gallery-goers who had come to expect murky realism of Charles Ephraim Burchfield were in for a surprise. Artist Burchfield has had a violent shift of purpose. One of the top half-dozen painters of the "American Scene," Burchfield, at 52, has decided that the look of a scene is not enough. Said he last week, as his first Manhattan show since 1943 opened: "Subject matter can be distracting; I'm trying to paint more what I feel...
...paint the way he feels, Burchfield has tried hard to remember the country around Salem, Ohio, where he was raised-instead of the bleak surroundings of suburban Buffalo, where he now lives. His house was on the edge of Salem, and the edge of the woods. When he was eight, Burchfield knew how to tell trees apart, and how to people their shadows with figures he had read about in fairy tales. Four years at the Cleveland School of Art and a job with an automobile-parts company were not enough to change him. His first important paintings...
...Buffalo and got a job designing wallpaper. Sundays he painted literal descriptions of the more depressing sights he saw around town. They sold well enough for him to retire to suburban Gardenville in 1929 and concentrate on showing the U.S. its dreary back streets and railroad sidings. Burchfield has the unassuming confidence of a man who has learned a lot slowly, believes that now, in combining fantasy and realism, he has come full circle. Says he: "All the rest was a sort of preparation. I am now beginning to do the things I was really intended...
...Burchfield, a six-footer, looks like a well-dressed, grey-haired businessman who has pleasant secrets of his own, but he is wistful and diffident. He likes to talk about his work, and talks well...
Each of the six huge watercolors in Burchfield's new exhibition shows an easily recognizable season. He got ideas for his howling, Disney-like Blizzard (which he describes as "the sort of storm that might have descended on that mythical village of the old fairy tale The Snow Queen") by tramping Gardenville's streets on last winter's worst days, when it was too cold to stop anywhere long and sketch. He sees in it, above the houses, "the ghostly spirit of the wind and snow, about to engulf the village, and beyond that is a dark...