Charles Ephraim Burchfield was born on April 9, 1893 and raised in Salem, Ohio. His initial studies were at the Cleveland School of Art, with a later scholarship to New York’s National Academy of Design. Burchfield followed his own inner guidance, however, and ended his association with the National Academy after only a single day of classes. Charles then returned to Salem and took a job with an automobile parts manufacturer, working assiduously on his art during his free time.
Burchfield and M.H. Birge
After a stint in the Army painting camouflage patterns, Burchfield found it necessary to obtain what he described as "worthwhile" employment because he had met his future wife and become engaged. By submitting one of many nature studies done between 1915-1917, Burchfield was able to get a designer’s position with M.H. Birge & Sons in Buffalo, New York, then one of the top wallpaper manufacturing companies in the United States.
Surprisingly, Burchfield did not balk at the prospect of applying his talent to commercial means and stayed at Birge through the 1920s. He was also creatively energized by Buffalo’s then-thriving urban landscape, though he did move his family to the region’s more rural Gardenville a few years later and built a studio there. Gardenville, located in New York’s West Seneca Township, would be Burchfield’s home base for the remainder of his life.
On the American Scene
A shift from being a designer to a manager at Birge troubled Burchfield, who was on the verge of developing an ulcer from his new administrative responsibilities and the pressures of supporting a wife and five children. Fortunately, Burchfield’s wife Bertha encouraged him to pursue his true artistic ambitions and noted how she’d rather be "poor and hungry" than have her husband die from a stress-related illness. By 1929, Burchfield had found significant New York gallery representation and was able to leave Birge and paint full-time.
At this point, Burchfield was included among the "American Scene" group of painters, who often featured urban or industrial settings in their work. Burchfield’s friend and fellow artist Edward Hopper was another American Scene painter, and Burchfield is frequently mentioned in critical context with Hopper. Burchfield’s preference for watercolors, however, offers a kind of liquid transience as opposed to Hopper’s fixed, static style. Additionally, Burchfield’s art—particularly his nature-inspired scenes—is more exaggerative and lush than Hopper’s sense of taut control and haunting spareness.
Natural Rhythms
Towards the 1940s, Burchfield found himself returning to inspirations from his watershed years of 1915 through 1917 and again focusing on personal perceptions of nature. There is a heightened sense to these earlier and later paintings, such as in The Song of the Katydids, which Burchfield himself described as full of "monotonous, mechanical, brassy rhythms…combining with heat waves of the sun, and saturating trees and houses and sky." For Burchfield, nature was not something to be depicted as much as felt, with a strong need for reconnection to man’s mysterious and primal link to the natural world around him.
Legacy
Charles Burchfield died in January of 1967, after a prolific and distinguished career. His legacy is well-regarded in American art, and in his honor the Charles Burchfield Center (now the Burchfield Penney Art Center) at Buffalo State College was established in 1966, along with Ohio’s Charles Burchfield Homestead Society and the Charles E. Burchfield Nature and Art Center in West Seneca, New York. Burchfield’s artwork can also be found in numerous American museums and the Tate Collection, U.K.
Sources
- Oral History Interview with Charles E. Burchfield, August 1959 -- Smithsonian Archives of American Art
- Charles Burchfield’s Watercolor Walls -- The Buffalo News
- The Burchfield Penney Art Center
