Fascinating Facts about Artist Charles E. Burchfield
About His Early Work as an Artist...
* All text in this paragraph (see below) taken directly from Wikipedia on January 1, 2023
"Burchfield's style was largely developed by the summer of 1915, after his junior year at the Cleveland School of Art, as he sketched and painted constantly in and around Salem, OH, "gathering the materials for a lifetime," according to his journals. Exposed in school to modernist European trends, he developed an almost fauvist use of broad areas of simplified color, enlivened by delightful particularizations of nature, and in 1917, began combining visual motifs projecting human moods, often disturbing, into the pictures. Assigned to the camouflage unit in the Army in 1918, he even worked his designs into painting schemes disguising tanks and artificial hills. Biographers note his exposure to modernist trends and traditional Chinese painting while in art school but overlook that the hallucinatory quality in his work may be partly traced to an episode of nervous exhaustion in 1911 while a junior in high school. Determined to record all the area's flowering plants that spring, he stayed up late at night painting whole bouquets of the blooms and had a bout of what was referred to at the time as "brain fever," which might now be termed mania. He seems to have learned to use it as a source of energy and inspiration, and his school transcript records only three days' absence that semester. Painting constantly from 1915, even while working full-time in summer and after college, he sketched on walks to and from home at lunchtime and completed paintings based on them at night. Half of his lifetime output of paintings was produced while living in Salem from 1915 to 1917. The fact that so many paintings of this period were depictions of scenes visible from the windows of his boyhood home prompted Henry Adams, curator of drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art, to call it "the most important house in American art history."
-- Wikipedia text posted by Ross Alan Bachelder of artsaplenty.me on January 1, 2023
NOTICE: THE ALBRIGHT KNOX GALLERY, BUFFALO, NEW YORK, to RE-OPEN IN MAY, 2023.
I went there to see several of Burchfield's works a few years ago, then made another pilgrimage to MoMA (NYC) to see a Burchfield retrospective. And I plan to go to Buffalo again,this spring, to see MORE Burchfield works in AKG's new location elsewhere in town.
(But be aware: AKG is expected to have a brand new name by then!)
TO LEARN MORE about move, GO TO https://spectrumlocalnews.com/...
PS: The Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, Maine, has a magnificent Burchfield painting in its permanent collection...
Yay! New gallery added
Click on "Manage Gallery" to add images