Word: burchfields
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...Your article on the American artist Charles Burchfield [June 15] was of great interest to me, as I am a native Salemite (Ohio) and knew the Burchfield family...
...Victorian gimcrackery. It was so downright, honestly ugly that, like George Arliss, it was positively beautiful. The sound of its bell, to paraphrase Poe, was "In the startled ear of night/ How it screamed out its affright!" I think that old tower perhaps may have had a soul, and Burchfield, like William Blake, was able to commune with such spirits...
...Charles Burchfield saw it, any landscape painter worthy of the name had to take his nature raw. "You cannot experience a landscape until you have known all its discomforts," he said. "You have to curse, fight mosquitoes, fall over rocks and skin your knees, be stung by nettles, scratched by grasshopper grass and pricked by brambles before you have really experienced the world of nature." He braved winter winds and rainstorms to sketch outdoors. One March day, inspired by a "glorious thaw," he trudged out to a nearby woods and had hardly set up his easel when a thunderstorm came...
...Burchfield's perseverance paid off in some of the most unusual nature painting in American art. In memory of the artist, who died in 1967, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica, N.Y., is currently displaying a 441-work retrospective. Organized by Assistant to the Director Joseph Trovato, the show ranges from schoolboy sketches to some of his last large watercolors, handsomely illuminating Burchfield's special gifts. Sweeping views and majestic scenery were not his forte. Rather, he marveled at nature's moods, the songs of crickets and cicadas, the sound of the wind in the telegraph...
Graphic Symbols. Burchfield's love of nature verged on the mystical; more than once, he confided in the journal he kept for more than 50 years, he fled the woods in terror of mysterious presences. "I have never learned to talk and have only listened to the trees," he wrote. Born in Ashtabula. Ohio, in 1893, he grew up in Salem, where he and his sister Louise often romped in Post's Woods hunting spring flowers, a pastime he later recalled in White Violets and Coal Mine. Even then he liked to sketch, and in high school recorded...