Art is a journey into the most unknown thing of all - oneself. Nobody knows his own frontiers… I don’t think I’d ever want to take a road if I knew where it led.

Louis Kahan
Charles Ephraim Burchfield (1893 - 1967)  [+] Title: Landscape   Media: Watercolor on Paper   Size: 8.25” x 11.25”
Charles Burchfield  (1917-1955) [+] (Y-B)    Decorative Landscape, Shadow (Willows on Vine Street) (1916, 50x35cm; in the collection of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Museum, Utica, NY) is a perceptual puzzle and a poem of transfiguration.  From the horizon downward the painting shows two trees along a rural street beside a rural house; color notes are written within the heavily drawn pencil outline. Cover the top of the picture with a sheet of paper, and there is nothing that any talented weekend painter might not have done. But as the trees reach the sky the visual symbols change to black and white patterns. The branches thin as if backlit by intense light or etherealized by a mystical rapture, and the crown of leaves dissolves into strange semaphors. Is it daylight, or dark? The black form at the upper right reads like the crown of a dark tree, but has the impact of a sky spangled with stars — there is no color to tip our perception either way. The cluster of black dots at the upper right and the chevrons of small strokes that indicate leaves are like the symbols of a topographical map, or notations of force or movement rather than form. The picture presents the kind of impossible double perspective that is more familiar in the works of J.C. Escher, but Burchfield pulls it off without any geometrical distortions through his idiosyncratic and uninterpretable rendering of perfectly familiar objects, and a stylized transfiguration that hints at spiritual energies, or ominous subconscious urges, or a mind that can grasp a transcendent dimension within the everyday world without making one seem more real than the other.(http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/artist27.html)
Charles Burchfield (American, 1893–1967)Insect Chorus, 1917 http://my.hamilton.edu/assets/mmlibrary/images/original/naturalist5big.jpg
Charles E. BurchfieldTITLEMoon through Young SunflowersDATE1916 
Heat Waves in a Swamp Charles Burchfield (1893-1967)
Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) Sunflower
Charles Burchfield American, 1893 - 1967  The Luminous Tree, 1917 Watercolor on paper, 22 x 14 inches Gift of the Charles Burchfield Foundation, Inc. Brauer Museum of Art, 73.7
CHARLES BURCHFIELD (1893–1967) Winter Landscape, 1918
CHARLES BURCHFIELD (1893–1967) Moonlight Over the Arbor, 1916
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