The Painter Who Listened to the Landscape
The Sphinx and the Milky Way: Selections from the Journals of Charles Burchfield. Edited by Ben Estes (The Song Cave)
Right now, I’m dealing with some health issues that are more annoying than anything else.
Instead of getting angry about the situation, I allowed myself to be captivated by the artwork and writings of Charles Burchfield (1893–1967). A naturalist painter and prose writer, but unlike anyone else in that field. His watercolor landscapes of the natural world are spiritual, dark, and truly psychedelic. He also kept a journal throughout his life, and what I see in this edited volume by Ben Estes is remarkably reflective literature.
Burchfield’s sensitivity to every detail of the outdoors—birds, insects, the changing air—runs parallel to his worries about money and the shape of his life.
In his lifetime, he was a highly successful artist, with a retrospective held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1930. That success allowed him to leave his day job designing wallpaper for a company in New Jersey, a job he truly hated.
Burchfield and his wife, along with their five children, lived in seclusion, apart from the industrial world. Perhaps because of the size of the family, he desired time alone in nature, observing and painting what he saw.
I think of Burchfield’s painting as going beyond sight—into another realm or texture that exposes the inner qualities of the landscape before him. I can’t even think of him as an American or European artist. His vision and composition are too original.
The same is true of his writing: his eye misses nothing, yet he knows how to expand what is in front of him into something larger and more revealing. In his journal dated November 7, 1955, he notes, as an older man: “Sometimes perhaps I shall feel more like writing about this agonizing time—but not now. …At the height of the pain remembering the little field mouse I mutilated when a boy.”
This is not a typical journal entry. He mainly records changes in the weather, the thickness of the grass, the insects and creatures inhabiting the woods at night and during the day.
The shocking thing about the field mouse is his discovery of cruelty, and how he could never let go of that memory. This stays with me because I recall incidents from my own childhood—cruelty to ants. I did it once, and never again. Yet I learned something about myself, and I think Burchfield experienced something similar: the awareness of the violence that can live within oneself.
The pastel tone of his writing is deeply comforting, but like his paintings, it contains streaks of darkness, mingled with his appreciation of nature.
If I sit under a tree beneath a beautiful sky, my feelings are mixed. It’s hard to reflect on a perfect weather day—or a stormy, wet evening—without sensing a mood that feels like a character in its own right.
I believe Burchfield felt that presence whenever he painted.
Much of appreciating nature has to do with control. Some American and British gardens grow wild and untamed, while in Asian countries and in France, nature is controlled and designed by human hands.
Burchfield’s genius is to capture nature not as it is, but as he imagines it to be.
The world is always a reflection of oneself, and it’s hard to move away from that.
Charles Burchfield, “Dusty Road in July”
Charles Burchfield “Heat Waves in a Swamp”
Charles Burchfield “Sunrise in the Forest”
Buy the book HERE